Experience
The company town as a business model
An industrialist who designs not only the factory but the life of the people who work in it: houses, school, church, cemetery. Two days in a company town listed as world heritage, inside a hydroelectric plant that still runs.
On this page
Experience with a working industrial plant. Of the eleven published Italian two-day experiences, three walk into a place where something is produced today. This is one of the three.
Fact sheet
- Days
- 2
- City
- Crespi d'Adda (Bergamo), based in Milan
- Recommended season
- March to November; the best window is March-April
- Group
- 10 to 30 participants
- Language of the visits
- Italian, English, French and German, at an extra charge
- Price
- Quotation on request
→ Request a quotation · Download the itinerary in PDF
Itinerary day by day
Day 1 — The village
In the morning, meeting point at the UNESCO Visitor Centre of Crespi d'Adda. A full guided walk: the factory, the workers' houses, one family each, the school, the recreation center, the owner's house on the hill, the cemetery where the owning family's tomb looks down on the workers' graves. It lasts about two hours and is done on foot.
In the afternoon, a two-and-a-half-hour working session on site: you list the services the company provided and assign each of them a cost and a return. The opening question is whether that model was philanthropy, a staff retention strategy or control, and the answer is not a single one.
Day 2 — The plant
In the morning, the Crespi d'Adda hydroelectric plant. It is privately owned and it is a fully working installation: that is why it is visited only with a guide, for safety reasons, and only on dates fixed in advance between March and December. That is why the calendar of this experience is built backwards from the plant's dates, and not forwards from the flight dates.
In the afternoon, back to Milan and a two-hour closing session: each team writes which part of that model they would apply today to a company of fifty people, and which part would be illegal.
What you visit
| Place | What it is | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Crespi d'Adda company town | Late nineteenth-century industrial settlement, UNESCO world heritage, guided walks for groups with a published price list | Bookable |
| Crespi d'Adda hydroelectric plant | Private working installation, visitable only with a guide and on fixed dates between March and December | Bookable |
What is included and what is not
Included: the guided walk of the village with radio guides and a map, the guided visit to the hydroelectric plant on the dates when it opens, the transfer from and to Milan, four and a half hours of working sessions, the materials, one person from the Istituto with the group and the certificate of participation.
Not included: flight, lodging, meals, personal travel insurance, the extra charge for a visit in a language other than Italian, which is quantified in the quotation.
The season, and why
It is sold from March to November, and the best window is March-April.
It is not sold in January or February, for two reasons that do not offset each other: a large part of the walk is outdoors, and the hydroelectric plant opens only on fixed dates starting in March. A group taken there in January would walk in the cold and would not get into the only working installation on the itinerary, that is to say it would lose the reason the experience exists.
August is avoided, because of the closures.
Logistics and capacity
Crespi d'Adda is some forty kilometers from Milan and is reached by coach in under an hour. The meeting point is the UNESCO Visitor Centre, in Corso Manzoni.
The village has no declared maximum capacity, because it is a village and not a room: it is the only Italian two-day experience that holds up to 30 participants without splitting. The visit to the plant, by contrast, is with a compulsory guide: the number admitted per slot is confirmed on booking.
The recommended group is still 15 people for the quality of the visit, but here, unlike the rest of the Italian catalog, a group of 30 does not force the itinerary to be split.
Cover
The program includes an accident and public liability policy for the whole stay. The sums insured, the insurer and the policy number are published once it is taken out and are attached to the contract; until then they can be requested in writing, with an answer within two working days.
Related experiences
Who decides the shape of a city (2 days, Milan) · The industrial triangle (7 days) · A certification is not a campaign (4 days)
Let us talk about this route
We answer within two working days with the dates, the day by day program and the quotation.