The Historical Archive "Antonella Bechi Piaggio"
In the triad that composes the cultural project promoted by Piaggio (Foundation, Museum and Archives), the starting point and the foundation are the Archives. Composed of some 4,000 files and still growing, the Archives include nine sections with over 3,700 record.
The Archives were the foundation stone of the Museum-Foundation project . In 1992 and 1993 the first steps were taken to initiate historical research into the company's origins, commissioned to Tommaso Fanfani by Giovanni Alberto Agnelli. An agreement was drawn up between Piaggio and the University of Pisa to start the research project. Successively - to mark over 100 years of the company's existence - a first editorial result emerged in the form of a book entitled Una leggenda verso il futuro. 110 anni di storia della Piaggio (A legend towards the future. 100 years of Piaggio history). It was the first step, a context for an wide-ranging and minute research of all the historical traces of Piaggio not only in Pontedera, but also in Genoa and in all the other Italian and foreign towns in which Piaggio had set up factories.
The documentation in the Archives brings to life the people and situations that wrote the history of communication in Italy through design, photography and promotional messages.
Today the Archives - dedicated to Giovanni Alberto Agnelli's mother Antonella Bechi Piaggio - contain over 150,000 documents. The company has recently given the Archives a vast cross-section of human resources documentation that contains the details of all the workers, employees and managers who worked at Piaggio from 1917 to the 1970s. It is of extraordinary relevance for in-depth study of industrial relations and the reconstruction of the civil and economic structure of the territory of Pontedera.
This acquisition, together with the collection that already existed, lets the Piaggio Archives take their place among the richest company archives in the world. (Access to the "Antonella Bechi Piaggio" Historical Archive)
