The world, it never stops turning

For the 29th Milan Fair, the chairman of the Fair Board, Luigi Gasparotto, invited the Italian President Luigi Einaudi to assist at the inauguration for a second time. Attracting 26 nations, 700 exhibitors, and 9000 visitors, once again this year the fair was experienced by the public as a great stage transforming all the latest industrial products and machines into wonders of discovery.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the Sanremo Casino for an exceptional night organized by RAI—a song night, featuring the Cinico Angelini orchestra. We will be awarding, from the two hundred and forty compositions entered by just as many Italian songwriters, the greatest song of the year.” With these words, Nunzio Filogamo opened the first ever Sanremo Music Festival, held at the city’s casino, inaugurating a show that would go on to inspire the Eurovision Song Contest. Ever since, the Festival has continued to host many of the biggest names on the Italian music scene every year, marking an annual moment when the country stops for a collective ritual, bringing people together around music.

The year 1951 was also marked by the signing of the Treaty of Paris, when on April 18th, diplomats representing Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands—the founding members of the future European Union—met in Paris to establish the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). The treaty was an extraordinary first step in the pooling of sovereignty, with many of its objectives still part of the European treaties in force today, sewing one of the seeds that would later grow into the European Union.

The racing car driver José Froilán González set the fastest lap time on the Silverstone circuit in England, going on to win the first Formula 1 Grand Prix for Ferrari in its history.

From The Beatles to the Fiat 500, the miniskirt to Carosello, the 1960s was a revolutionary decade, as new fashions and trends emerged on the scene. Numerous social, political, and cultural events would profoundly shape the values, aspirations, and lifestyles of new generations. As young people sought out new means of self-expression and manufacturers sought to ride the wave of technological progress, humankind as a whole was soon to witness the dawning of a space age that would shape world history. In Italy, the 1960s was the decade of generational blossoming and the economic miracle—a social, cultural, and business explosion that transformed the country into a major industrial power of the age. In next to no time, urban centres such as Milan and Rome became major metropolises, Italian lifestyles changed, and new consumption patterns emerged.

The “Made In Italy” trademark emerged around the turn of the 1960s to become a global catchphrase for premium quality and style, capturing in the collective imagination the value of Italian know-how and taste. Its roots lie in the development of the country’s family-owned small and medium enterprises, which thanks to new means of production successfully managed to transform small craft workshops into major business concerns.

As a world stage for pioneering advances and innovation, the Milan Fair quickly became the most well-known and prestigious showcase of Made in Italy manufacturing.

In 1961, the inspired efforts of a small group of furniture makers led to the staging of the first Milan Furniture Fair, still today the leading annual event for the world of furniture and industrial design. Conceived with the aim of promoting exports, the fair soon proved an excellent way to unlock the full potential of an industry that was still highly fragmented. The first edition of the Milan Furniture Fair, held at the Milan fairgrounds, was a huge success. By 1994, it had become the world’s biggest trade fair, with 328 exhibitors and over 12,100 visitors.

The automobile undeniably stands out as a hallmark of the Italian economic miracle, the status symbol of a new era. Thanks to its affordable price, the Fiat 500 was the first car bought by millions of people, a symbol of practicality, efficiency, and style. It was these characteristics that would lead the car’s designer, Dante Giacosa, to win the Compasso d’Oro industrial design award in 1959, for designing “a typical example, in the automotive sector, of a model spawned by the close integration of the mass production techniques belonging to the mechanical engineering industry and the specific economies of scale required to produce a car for the wider public.”

The Milan Fair was a stage for some two-thirds of the inventions patented in the post-war era. Year after year, the showcase featured stands and pavilions of awe-inspiring impact that would go down in living memory. One such exhibition was set up by RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana when it displayed samples of lunar rocks collected by the Apollo 11 astronauts, their space suits, and some of their equipment.

The event attracted enthusiastic crowds, as in those same days the whole world watched with bated breath the dramatic developments of the Apollo 13 mission.

Carosello changed the course of advertising history. As the first television show dedicated to product promotions, its innovative, entertaining format quickly distinguished it from the American standard, by not rudely interrupting broadcasts. Airing short sketches on television at set time slots, storytelling fun was the key to the show, featuring characters—such as Lavazza’s celebrated Carmencita and her Caballero—that in many cases would become more famous than the brands themselves.

In the afternoon of January 10th, 1971, the whole world stopped to say farewell to one of the greatest style icons of the twentieth century. Coco Chanel, the bold and daring fashion designer who revolutionized the female silhouette, passed away at the Hotel Ritz in Paris at the age of 88. Her passing, however, did not mark the end of an era, as Chanel would become the embodiment itself of French fashion, as well as a symbol of a certain outlook on the world.

Imagine there’s no heaven / It’s easy if you try / No hell below us / Above us, only sky. So begins Imagine, arguably the most memorable song of John Lennon’s solo career, after his rise to fame with The Beatles—indeed, Rolling Stone magazine ranks it third in its definitive list of the Greatest Songs of All Time. A single that reminds us, in the words of Yoko Ono, “that we are all one world, one country, one people,” becoming the anthem not only of their generation, but of all those to come.

The history of the second half of the twentieth century was marked by rapid, constant transformation. Looking back from afar at the two decades that separate 1951 from 1971, the steady pace at which the world revolves around its axis contrasts starkly with the dizzying speed of change sweeping the society of the time.

The Milan Fair was part of that bustling movement, reflecting the changes of society, but also the bigger collective challenges of innovation and competition. While firmly attached to the civic context of Milan where it took root, the fair increasingly opened its doors to the world, thus becoming a reliable, concrete fulcrum in the relentless quest for prosperity that shaped the post-war years until the oil crisis of the Seventies.