On Thursday 20 June 2024, at 6 pm, at the Civic Library of Varese, in via Sacco 9, Andrea Cannata will present his volume One Hundred Thousand Horses for Milan. Hydroelectric history of the Toce and Devero basins from Ettore Conti to nationalization (Bellavite ed., 2023).
Andrea Cannata graduated in Mechanical Engineering and Energy Engineering from the Polytechnic of Milan and joined Enel Produzione in 2009. After having been Head of Plant in Verampio and Pallanzeno, he now holds the role of Maintenance Manager for Enel Green’s hydroelectric plants Power of Piedmont. A great expert on the historical, technical and architectural heritage of the hydroelectric system of the Ossola Valley, between 2016 and 2017 he curated the exhibition Men, Machines and Dams set up in Crodo, Formazza and Milan; he published the volume Sabbione in 2019. Story of a dam and the men who built it.
The book organically recounts the hydroelectric development of the Devero, Formazza and Antigorio Valleys, from the end of the 19th century to 1962, the year of nationalization and the birth of Enel: a time span in which the lives of two important industrial figures overlap Italian, Ettore Conti and Giacinto Motta, the vicissitudes of three distinct companies, the Conti Enterprises, the Società Serbatoi Alpini and Edison, in a period of time that spans two World Wars, the years of Fascism and those of the post-war period and which runs in parallel to the evolution of electrical engineering. A history that has seen the contribution of the great names of Italian engineering, Villoresi, Ganassini, Marcello and of the largest electromechanical and construction industries of the past century, Riva, Franco Tosi, Officine di Savigliano, TIBB, Ercole Marelli and the Umberto Girola Company, to mention just the most recurring names. The legacy of those years is not only technical, it is not the only complex set of plants, dams, canals, power plants, but it is an intimate trace on the territory of astonishing hydroelectric architecture; not a random result, but the result of a precise will of Ettore Conti, who commissioned the brilliant architect Piero Portaluppi to design his power plants.
The almost 500 largely unpublished images, collected in the 348 pages of the volume, do not only tell the story of the evolution of photographic technique, but in the shots we also discover the metamorphosis of the territory, of the working techniques, of the people, of their appearance and their condition.
