Primo Levi at SIVA

"I began working at Siva when I was 16, but I was not employed by Siva but by a craftsman, an outside contractor named Valter Strozzi I was just a boy, an electrician's helper. [...] After I was there for several years as a skilled worker, they hired me, I think in '76, and I became a full-fledged employee of Siva, where I stayed until it closed down for good in '99. I worked on the maintenance of the mechanical and electrical equipment. But even before I was hired, as a boy, being that my father worked there and that we've always lived nearby, I would already hang around Siva, at least around the gatekeepers’ booth. On Sundays I would go there to the gatekeepers, who at least had a television while we did not. In a way, they adopted me a bit... When I received my first communion, they came too. This is why I already knew it, Siva. And it just happened that I even ended up working there.

Once there was a new paint-thinning machine that came in and it collapsed in on itself, and so we went to the mechanical workshop to find out why. We examined the water drains because it could have been the drain that was not working. So, Primo Levi was there too to examine all those things, to see if there was anything that was connected wrong. He was there too. He was looking. He went, 'Take the flashlight so that we can look and see if there is something blocking the tube.' He was interested – he too – in quotes – 'like one of us.' He didn’t make his position weigh on us. And we, we didn’t think that we had this great character among us, which, instead, is what came out later.

"I began to work in 1960 and worked until 1994 - 34 years. After I came to Turin from the province of Ferrara in ’56 and before I was hired by Siva, I was a delivery person for a playing-card company. Then I was a baker for some time and then through Mrs. Tambini I managed to get into Siva and I stayed there until I retired. When I myself first went into the factory, it was really a disaster. There were no masks. There wasn’t anything. The smells were really foul. We changed our clothes in the factory, we took showers and we couldn’t take our Siva stuff outside because it was polluting. There were about a hundred of us. There weren’t all the machines that there are now. Everything was done by hand. If we had to prepare the cans, there was somebody who filled them, somebody who boxed them, somebody who stuck on the labels…. It was only after that we began to get bigger, to do things automatically, but at the time there were really only a few of us.

I am a fifth-grade elementary-school graduate. This was the time when they put in a new piece of equipment that we called 'the castle,' and they taught me how it ran. That castle – I made it run forwards and backwards with my eyes closed. In fact, I was the one who taught all of them. When they hired somebody for the castle, they would call me to teach him. One day Primo Levi showed up there with the design of the installation in his hand and says, 'Cappelli, come to the office with me.' He wanted to know how the castle worked. So I told him, 'Doctor, if you want to know how it works, come up to the last floor with me, and little by little as you come down, I’ll explain to you how it works.' He answered me, 'Cappelli, I don’t know how it runs as you do when you are working, I only know the design.' But I know how to get the castle going but didn’t understand the design."

"Since I knew that Levi was interested in me a bit, I went to his house on Corso Re Umberto to have, let’s say, a job interview. In the end he told me, 'Look, I’ll give you a good write-up. In fact, you are very, very experienced with paints, so we’ll get along.'

If he had had the pride that a regular person had, he would have been someone who could have won the Nobel Prize for his studies of new products. And this did not interest him. He had talent, but he needed to have a bit of pride too. He put no store in being somebody in front of the others. [...] More than teaching me, we would do things together. At Siva there wasn’t a chief. We were all friends there.

As the years went by, there were many new pieces of equipment that came in. But there wasn’t any machine to analyze the products. We did everything empirically – I want to say – not with ultramodern equipment. We measured the acidity, the fusion point – that is, at what temperature it melted – the thermal resistance, the chemical resistance, the mechanical resistance. They were products… they were not normal paints. They were paints for electrical insulation. They were more difficult than other paints. They were on a superior plane."

"So, I entered Siva when I was 16. Mrs. Franca Tambini took me on as a switchboard operator – to let you know – and I stayed at Siva until 1980. As the years went by, I had my little career. I became the chief of the purchase office and so I was in contact with Primo Levi, who, being the director of the factory, was a bit interested in everything. Sometimes I would go on trips with him – to Esso or Montedison to set up big contracts. I told him, 'Look, doctor, I’ll be quiet as a mouse. I’ll listen to you.' And I remember the answer, which was something incredible. 'No, look, you are much better than me. You talk.'

He was a chemist, basically a laboratory person. What I am about to say is not a criticism, but he was not very suited for the command of personnel – that is, he did not conform to its parameters. In fact, one the reasons why he went away was that a union was organized. There was a person, a skilled worker, who became the head of the workers – and really this is right – to stand for the interests of the workers and, at this point, Levi was cut off. He couldn’t manage to conceive it. Basically he wasn’t prepared for these things. He knew his work very well, but, according to me, he was not interested in things he did not feel secure with."

"I met my first wife in England in a spectrometry course. We got married and lived in England for two years. Then her father, Mr. Accati, who was the owner of Siva and two or three plants there in Turin, asked me to come here and work since I was a chemist and this was a chemical plant. I resisted for two years because this seemed to be too much of a change for me together with getting married. But then the company that I was working for in London wanted to transfer me to Doncaster, which is a place that was a bit industrial. And I decided - instead of going to the north of England - to go to the south of Europe. I began to work here in the summer of 1973. When I came, I didn’t even speak Italian. For a bit of time I was there learning the language and getting to know the factory. Eventually, I was in charge of production and then plant manager.

Once we were at dinner with two English company representatives and were eating polenta. The Englishman asked, 'It is very good. What is it made from?' And Levi who wanted to say corn – maize – in English, answered 'mice.' And this Englishman went white. He thought he was eating some mixture based on mice".