McFilter

Amid my explorations of the flooding the other week, I took a brief detour to another of Torino's beautiful gallery buildings, the Societa Promotrice delle Bella Arti (the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts, if my Italian serves). That's it on the left. As part of the World Design Capital 2008 celebrations, it's hosting an exhibition about local(-ish, Ivrea is half-an-hour or so's drive from Turin) design-led manufacturers Olivetti.

These days, Olivetti is an almost forgotten part of Telecom Italia, but it had a much more illustrious past. The exhibition charts the history of the company, from its very early days making industrial machinery through the extensive range of typewriters (including the classic Valentine, pictured below) and into calculating machines and computers.

Although I knew about some of the computers and the Ettore Sottsass Valentine, I was surprised to find out some of the other things that Olivetti got up to, particularly Adriano Olivetti - son of founder Camillo Olivetti.

As well as building up the business, Adriano was quite politically active. After the Second World War he founded the anti-fascist Movimento Comunita and the exhibition has an interesting collection of posters and leaflets promoting the meetings and such. Then in later years, he was involved in planning and shaping the Val d'Aosta - working out how to resolve the conflicting interests of tourism for the ski resorts, preserving some of the natural beauty of the area, and the needs of the local communities.

It's a wonderfully curated exhibition, thoughtfully laid out and with a great attention to detail. Ambient sound has been used to great effect - you hear the typewriters clacking, or the big 1960s computer tapes whirring - but it's never intrusive and the space is broken up so that the noise only accompanies the relevant exhibits.

The 60s mainframe is also placed into a room of its own, surrounded by mocked-up disk and tape units, so you get a real feel for what it was really like.

Yet in other places, the layout is almost playful: rather than display a single Valentine typewriter, there's a row of them that's almost a work of art in itself. Rather than one pocket calculator, there's an array of them on a circular table, laid out like the markings on a clock.

The exhibition runs until the 27th July, for anyone here in in Turin who wants to take a visit.