The Pirelli Magazine has now reached its twelfth month, and with this edition it starts its second year.

This endeavour has been a success, and the interest created in Italy and abroad, as well as the participation of authoritative contributions, confirm this. In the beginning, sceptics were not lacking but they later expressed their sincere admiration when they saw the magazine prosper, despite the seemingly difficult task of keeping it up and running. Indeed, the faith manifested by Mr Alberto Pirelli when presenting the first edition of “Our Magazine” was well-founded and meditated.

Our lives as workers – besieged by the problem of producing ever more rapidly and in greater abundance all those necessities to meet the growing material needs of humanity – are laced with a dangerous utilitarian imperative, that flings us into the clutches of exasperating mechanical phenomena and cold economic diktats from which we feel an ever-growing need for salvation.

The impending desire to make our task more noble and to evade this condition grows in parallel with the increasing vitality of the material phenomenon that strives to subjugate us. This is a providential reaction, as it is the sign of a greater imperative to find some equilibrium between these contrasting forces, so that harmony can be established and guarantee the continuation of our existence by safeguarding its finest values.

If we don’t want this disequilibrium to become toxic, the spiritual and the material realities must advance together and be free from any dangerous deformations or perilous upheavals. And what better place to verify the existence and functioning of this harmonious equilibrium than the very place where any fracture could easily prove to be threatening? It is no miracle that an industry – a typically utilitarian organisation, with the mission of producing material necessities for everyday life – also aims to treat on a cultural level problems that could be considered inferior (revealing that side to the same technicians, who deal with them without realising this, and to the artists, who have not even suspected their existence), identifying something nobler in the apparently arid and mundane and regarding this as something to be held high and cherished with great spirit. This is no miracle, but something natural, born from a correct intuition and orientation: a sign of sensitivity and farsightedness. A manifestation of our self-preservation, for the elevation of our species.