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HOW DOES A company town reinvent itself once the company leaves town? In some respects, Ivrea reflects broader trends in Italy, rather than circumstances unique to itself. Changes in technology may have made Olivetti obsolete, but the Italian economic miracle of the 1950s and ’60s peaked around 1970 anyway, when Fiat’s production headquarters, in nearby Turin, became one of the largest car factories in Europe (and during which time Olivetti was still one of the most successful manufacturers of typewriters and other business machines in the world). This growth was helped by a mass migration of workers from the country’s impoverished south to the heavily industrialized northwest. But as the ’70s turned into the ’80s, Turin, Ivrea and other cities and towns that had grown rapidly after World War II fell victim to the same economic trends that would stunt the growth of American manufacturing towns across the Rust Belt: Recurring recessions meant that costs were cut across all industries, labor was outsourced to cheaper countries and companies like Fiat and Olivetti began laying off thousands of workers, plunging the very concept of the company town into an existential crisis. There are, according to a 2016 Italian environmental association report, some 2,500 rural Italian towns that are nearly abandoned and depopulated, half-empty monuments to departed industry. Others, like Ivrea, are more of a nostalgic time capsule, less a ruin than a shell of the past trying to find ways to bring back their old glory.
In Europe, however, the company town had its roots in the model estates of the Victorian era, where wealthy landowners housed workers and caretakers in paltry accommodations. At the dawn of the 20th century, and in a rapidly industrializing Italy especially, the fortunes of various small towns were, and for the most part remain, inextricably linked to private companies. The main draw of Rosignano Solvay, established in 1912 in southern Tuscany, for instance, is its beautiful white sand beaches, the blanching of the sand a result of toxic chemical waste from the still-operational Solvay plant, which gave the town its name. Colleferro, a dreary town just outside of Rome built around a munitions factory that closed in 1968, has been plagued for the last 70 years by occasional explosions. (There are still company towns in Italy — the designer Brunello Cucinelli has spent the last 30 years restoring the Umbrian hamlet of Solomeo to serve as his eponymous company’s headquarters, and Diego Della Valle, C.E.O. of the fashion brand Tod’s Group, relies on local craftsmen from Casette d’Ete, a region on the country’s east coast, where his company’s main factory is located.) But many of the best-known towns that orbit around a single industry or company can seem decidedly un-Italian: There is no ancient architecture or grand cultural tradition because much of what remains of their history is contained almost exclusively within the 20th century. The people who still live in these towns are often descendants of the original company workers that inhabited them, even though the company has long since packed up and left. But Olivetti is unique among these places; for a time, it was likely the most progressive and successful company town anywhere in the world, existing not for the sake of control or convenience but rather representing a new and short-lived kind of corporate idealism, in which business, politics, architecture and the daily life of the company’s employees all informed one another.
A former ship’s captain and a cook, they decided to drive around northern Spain in search of a quiet place to settle down — an old farmhouse, perhaps, or an abandoned mill.
NSO said it sells its spy software and technical support exclusively to governments and that those tools are to be used in pursuing suspected terrorists and other criminals. NSO has long maintained that its products cannot target U.S. phone numbers, though some cybersecurity experts have disputed that.