Cyclopica

Past and future for the next generation

A book with an imaginative title, evoking the greatness of infrastructural works that over the course of the past century have marked the evolution of Man, along a pathway consisting of hard work and challenges, where the culture of labor is combined with the dream of a better world.

A title that also evokes the camera lens, a unique eye that scrutinizes and fixes reality in time, and uses photography to feed our memory.

Even today, although techniques have changed with the advent of digital photography, images can describe moments, stories, distant lives in different places.

This book intends to recover fragments of life dispersed in time and in the memory of the Salini Impregilo Group in more than a century of history, brought back to life thanks to the ability of great photographers to immortalize moments and works that will endure in time.

It is the story of the labor of men who are strong and unique, and will never be replaced by machines. It is the epic nature and the constant innovation of the worker's craft, poised between technology and craftsmanship, that make each job one-of-a-kind. It is the image of ingeniousness and creativity brought to the rest of the world.
The images celebrate all those men who have both used technique and knowledge and know-how, and put great effort into building works that have come down to us thanks to another art: photography.

Salini Impregilo has decided to harness all the images of the most unique works in a large archive for the benefit of future generations.

There are fragments, stories about people and megaworks that have guided us from the first industrial development to our own day and age, through major infrastructures, that have brought city and town closer together, energy to all the houses, and developed territories all over the world.

This story by images traces two pieces of evidence with the ease and engagement that are typical of photography: the passing of time, visible in the evolution of the machinery, as well as technology, with the transition from traditional tunneling to the use of TBM; and the organization of the work, the spirit that never changes, which is what encourages men to challenge the impossible.

Some one hundred images have been chosen. They are a gift from Salini Impregilo and the historical companies that breathed life into the Group to photography, industry, and infrastructure enthusiasts, and to all those who will enjoy viewing in these images the commitment, effort, and passion that for more than a century have guided our work.

Pietro Salini
Chief Executive Officer of Webuild

Dedication

Stefano Cingolani

“This boundless region, the region of le boulot, the job, il rusco--of daily work, in other words—is less known than the Antarctic and through a sad and mysterious phenomenon it happens, that the people who talk most, and loudest, about it are the very ones who have never traveled through it." Primo Levi explored this thoroughly, and in his novel, The Monkey's Wrench, published in 1978, he portrayed it in a way that at the time seemed to go against the grain, poised between the elegy and the eulogy of universal values. Even the main character, the hero of Levi's unusual epic, was different from the stereotype of the worker prevalent in public debate, in the newspapers, and on television at the time. 

The current image, if anything, was that of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, the tramp without a trade who did a thousand odd jobs, the perfect figure for the Fordist model that dominated the American century, overwhelmed by the cogs of the assembly lines, shattered by a task too brainless to be human, with motions that were always the same and faster and faster, when assembly line work became the labor chain. Today, Chaplin's world is vanishing, while that of Primo Levi continues to assert itself with all its strength and uniqueness, with all the meaningfulness of what can never be replaced by a machine.

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