Two letters big enough to hang machinery on — S and G — anchor a cascade of photographs: machine tools, workshop interiors, and at the foot, resting in the corner like the point of the whole argument, a pair of binoculars.
«SAN GIORGIO» runs across the page in outlined capitals, with GENOVA SESTRI beneath; along the foot, the campaign banner, «PER L’AUTARCHIA — FORZE DEL LAVORO ITALIANO». The binoculars are what the montage funnels down to: from heavy machinery to the finished precision instrument, the company’s whole story in one page of photographs.
The precision works of Sestri Ponente
San Giorgio was founded at Genova-Sestri in 1905 by the industrialist Attilio Odero — the same Odero of the Odero-Terni-Orlando naval group, whose sheet from this campaign we publish separately. It began with cars and railway carriages, dropped both after the crisis of 1907, and rebuilt itself around precision engineering: optics, electromechanics, rangefinders, eventually becoming a major supplier to the Italian Navy and growing to more than twelve thousand workers by 1942. This is the second San Giorgio sheet in the collection: the first, published earlier, advertises the firm’s automatic shop scales — the civilian corner of the same precision business whose military-optical face the binoculars on this page represent.
Marks and date
The collector attributes the sheet to Erberto Carboni, reading an EC monogram at the left margin; on our scan no such monogram resolves, and the only small mark is the series’ agency roundel. Published without an attribution; no printed date, late-1930s campaign.
About this image. The work is still protected by copyright: under Italian law (L. 633/1941) rights run for 70 years from the death of the author. Since the author has not been identified, that term cannot be considered expired, and the image is treated as fully protected. It is reproduced here for documentation, study and critical purposes only, under Art. 70 of L. 633/1941 and the fair-use provision of 17 U.S.C. §107. The scan was made by the collector from his own copy of the sheet, part of the period material he keeps in a private archive: owning the physical sheet is not the same as holding the rights to the work. The image is not offered for sale, no reproduction rights are granted, and any request concerning the work should be addressed to the rights holders. Cultural Heritage Online publishes this material to document it, with no celebratory intent; see our terms and the DMCA contact published there.
Sources
- Our earlier article on the San Giorgio automatic-scales poster — the company’s history from 1905, Attilio Odero, the growth to 12,000 workers
- The sheet itself, for the montage and the banner.
