Fair people

Without all the men and women who stream through its turnstiles, the fairgrounds would be no more than a giant and silent expanse of stands, pavilions, and tree-lined avenues. But with its gates open to the world, it comes alive with colours, shapes, faces, languages, cultures, and expectations. This is what brings out the best in Fiera di Milano, as it reinvents itself every year in ever new forms and experiences.

April 12th, 1920 marked the opening of the first ever Milan Fair. Over the years, the various countries that participated in the event chose the fair as an opportunity to reiterate the friendship between their governments and peoples, expressed in endless handshakes, smiles, and the most curious of gifts.

Over its 100 years, Fiera di Milano has played host to major names in world politics and celebrities and stars of sport, show business, art, and culture in general—all blown over by the latest on show in the various industry sectors and by their exhibitions, featuring cutting-edge design trends, machinery, and technological solutions.

In the 1960s, the fairgrounds started on a new, lengthy path of constant expansion, which saw the exhibition space grow from a total of over 600,000 square metres at the end of the decade to almost two million by the early 2000s. Such growth no doubt helped fuel the dizzying rise in visitor numbers, which in the 1950s were already well over four million.

“What matters is not just the extraordinary growth the fair enjoyed, but the dual meaning such growth came to take on, as an engine of growth for the domestic and world economy as a whole, and as an indicator of such growth. A meaning of precious importance, because it enables the fair to be a driver towards a specific vision of economic, social, and cultural integration.”

As with any exhibition, walking—and observing—is the main activity visitors engage in. With the fairgrounds covering almost two million square metres of space, however, seeing the whole fair could be quite a feat, an achievement in itself.

And so, wandering around the fairgrounds one can come across, today just like yesterday, people dressed in their Sunday best, resting on the margins of the itinerary, waiting for friends or family to finish their visit to a stand, or others getting ready for another business meeting.

Episodes like these have been captured by numerous photographers—both professionals and amateurs—as they toured the fairgrounds with their cameras around their necks, immortalizing, with a pinch of humour, the curious of expressions on the faces of the people they came across. For Fiera di Milano is not just serious business, but also a vivid and colourful snapshot of Italy and its people.

Over its 100 years of life, Fiera di Milano has earned itself a celebrated reputation as a world-class venue for international trade shows and exhibitions—a reputation it continues to enjoy in the twenty-first century thanks to the quality of the shows it hosts and proposes.

It is also one of the world’s leading venues by visitor numbers, events hosted, and exhibition space. This achievement has come thanks not only to the organizers of the various events and the big international brands hosted, but also to the many professionals that keep the wheels of the fairgrounds turning—from the machinery operators and security guards to service staff and stand fitters. These skilled and specialist workers are the people who allow the fairgrounds to thrive and identify fully with the city of Milan and the quality of the events proposed.

Working over its contents with modern tools and methods, in 1985 Fiera di Milano launched a series of initiatives designed to give new spark to the Milan Fair.

Part of that project was a photographic book, for which two leading names in international photography were engaged—Gabriele Basilico and Gianni Berengo Gardin. The commission led to the release of the book La grande Fiera, 1985.

Their diverse, yet complementary perspectives tell a different story of the fair, one which shifts the products exhibited, industrial machines, and business people into the background, to shine a light instead on what ordinarily remains in the shadows. The scenes of daily life they show, captured in a variegated geometry of faces, figures, and forms, highlight their role as the living, breathing foundations of the grand theatre in which the great show of the Milan Fair was staged every year.

In 1995, Basilico returned to the Milan Fair for its 75th anniversary, this time accompanied by the museum curator Massimo Negri. This time round, their work focused on the fairgrounds themselves, immortalized in the book Arte a Milano 1906–1929.

In relation to those two key commissions involving Berengo Gardin and Basilico, the Historical Archive of the Fondazione Fiera di Milano holds over 500 items of photographic material, including prints, contact proofs, and slides.

This is an extremely important moment for Fiera di Milano. Thanks to the Historical Archive, it has become “more conscious of its past and mindful of its importance as an economic player, but it is also a time of momentum, of great acceleration towards the consolidation of its future.”

All of this, however, is still not complete. Which brings us to the exhibitors—the true magnet of attraction of the Milan fairgrounds. Without them, no fair each year would be the memorable moment that it is.
Thus we have the cornerstone closing and completing the complex architecture of the fairground and its fairs. From its balconies we can still see all the faces that over the decades have enabled it to be and remain the strong, stable driver that it is, a valid model of reference for the Italian economy and its industries.