Dalla macchina alla fabbrica, il ruolo delle Officine Reggiane nell’industria saccarifera

The Officine Reggiane is an essential Italian mechanical factory with a story lasting more than a century. During the production activity, the factory has been involved in many productive sectors, including – in the second post-war period – the sugar industry. In this field, in addition to dealing with repairs and maintenance, the production went from the design of the small machine, single component of the production chain, to the large machine, the whole mechanical organism. In a second time the Reggiane involved also in the design and production of the architectural building. On this road they designed and built sugar factories in Italy and the rest of the world, both for the production of beet sugar and for cane sugar. The paper aims to highlight the role of the Reggiane as an important piece in the whole history of the Italian agro-food industry and a significant contribution to the development of Italian and international industry from the post-war period to the present day, but also as a valuable example of integration between design, production and building of the machine-factory system.