Up on the Roof

In a little modernist fantasy of a penthouse, atop a huge commercial building in southern Turin, you’ll find an art museum like no other.  It’s called the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, and the penthouse is known as the Scrigno – “jewel box” or “treasure chest”.  The collection is small – just 25 pieces – but the quality is astonishing.  Among the paintings are six superb views of Venice by Canaletto, masterpieces by Giambattista Tiepolo, Manet, Renoir and Matisse, and even two pictures by Picasso.  Modigliani’s famous Reclining Nude is there as well, along with a couple of statues by Canova.  My first visit there was just before Christmas last winter.

I rode the escalator from the building’s ground-floor entrance to the first floor, walked down a wide corridor lined with shops, found a rather obscure side passage leading to a small lift, and pushed the button for the top floor.  When the door opened at the Scrigno, I paid 10 euros for entry to the Pinacoteca; and then, without a glance at the artworks, walked out of the penthouse onto the roof.

I meant no disrespect to Tiepolo, Matisse, et al., of course; but I had come to see first-hand another extraordinary work of art, or at least one spectacular part of it.  Because the entire building was, when it was first made, the embodiment of everything the Futurist artists of the time worshipped: modern industrial might, assembly-line production, power, and speed.  In fact, having left the jewel box, I was now standing on a roof-top automobile race-track, an oval test course over a kilometre long.  There, I ignored the lingering winter snow on the road surface and imagined newly-minted automobiles accelerating through the thrilling, elegantly banked curves at the corners.

The building is the Lingotto, the legendary FIAT automobile factory, designed to allow raw materials to enter the structure at the ground floor and emerge as completed vehicles on the roof, ready for a spin around the track.  Designed by the engineer Giacomo Mattè Trucco in 1916, the factory produced 80 different car models from 1923 to 1982, including such automotive icons as the FIAT 500A, the Topolino.  The last car to emerge on the roof was a Lancia Delta. 

Created a few years before the fascist takeover of the Kingdom of Italy, the Lingotto survived Mussolini, World War II (during which it was bombed by the RAF and the USAAF several times), and the abolition of the Italian monarchy.  It lasted through the post-war economic recovery, the massive migration of workers from the south to northern industries like FIAT, the creation of huge new urban neighbourhoods to house them, labour unrest, riots, government scandals, and terrorism from groups like the Red Brigades.  By the early 1980s, though, most of FIAT’s automobile production had long been moved to Turin’s Mirafiori plant, and the Lingotto’s assembly lines were officially closed.  But the grand old structure could not be allowed to become derelict, of course, and an international debate on possible uses for the factory began. 

It was called the Venti Progetti, because 20 famous architectural studios participated in the discussion.  Predictably, no single project was chosen, so in 1985 FIAT commissioned the Genovese architect Renzo Piano to convert the Lingotto to a modern, multi-use urban facility.  It was Piano who crowned the roof with the Scrigno, as well as a glass-globe conference centre called “The Bubble”.  (The Scrigno is topped with a wide, flat, high-tech sunshade, which makes the gallery, silhouetted against the sky, look a bit like the Starship Enterprise.)  Inside the Lingotto, where for six decades an army of up to 12,000 workers tended the assembly lines, there is now a modern shopping mall, a couple of hotels, a 2000-seat music auditorium, an indoor sports arena, an exhibition hall, offices, and a tropical garden.

While I was musing on the absorbing story of the Lingotto’s life, my wife joined me on the roof to take some photos.  Soon the wind began to blow the snowdrifts apart, and we scurried back into the Scrigno to bask in the warmth of the brilliant paintings in the gallery.  The marvellous richness of the collection is explained by the fact that it represents the cream of the artworks collected by Giovanni Agnelli and his wife Marella.  Giovanni, the grandson and namesake of FIAT’s founder, and himself a long-time chairman of the company, was the richest man in Italy when he died in 2002.  He and Marella were both fashion icons, and noted for their taste in art.

And then, after admiring the masterpieces, we did what almost everyone visiting the Lingotto nowadays does:  we went shopping. 

The shops were gaily decorated for the holidays, and I was happy to see that the great building was still full of life. But best of all, I thought, there are the memories.  Piano wisely let the structural bones of the grand old edifice remain; and, of course, he left the race track on the roof, although some safety-minded spoilsport has studded the surface with yellow bollards and speed bumps.  I don’t know who they are intended to control, unless, when all the visitors have left the Scrigno, and there’s no one else around, the ghosts of Topolinos past have been rat-racing recklessly in the twilight.

Text © 2018 by Joe Gartman; Photographs © 2018 by Patricia Gartman. First published in Italia! Magazine, November 2018