Those were years in which Nikita Khrushchev proposed competitive co-existence between the Soviet Union and the West to J. F. Kennedy, years in which Paul McCartney and John Lennon formed the Beatles and George W. Cochran of Utah State University announced his success in obtaining the synthesis of a molecule of nucleic acid. Those were years in which the effects of the 1957 law 635 were seen in Fiorano Modenese, exempting companies with less than 100 workers from all direct taxation on income for ten years in areas declared economically depressed. Factories sprung up like mushrooms and the population in towns doubled within a few years. Work and social progress arrived with the industrial sheds. Every morning Giancarlo Ferrari got up to go to work in a ceramics factory.

It was heavy work, the factories still functioning according to nineteenth century logic: few, heavy and tyrannical machines served by swarms of workers. Two pieceworkers who had to fill 6-7 trolleys a day, collected the tiles that emerged. In the eyes of someone like Giancarlo Ferrari who was able to look toward the future, it was clear that from then on, the road to economic progress would be paved with new machines able to relieve men from toil and make the productive process more efficient and safer. For anyone working with ceramics and with a talent for mechanics, it was easy to imagine how they could be made. Only courage was needed to begin the adventure. In 1961 Giancarlo Ferrari left working as an employee. And with a partner began to work with moulds for tiles and immediately afterwards, with plants at the service of pressing.

In '73 Giancarlo Ferrari, had the idea of constructing a machine that collected the unfired tiles from the presses and loaded them onto a trolley to transfer them to the firing kilns: it was the beginning of automation. A ceramics industrialist allowed him to tryout the prototype in his company: it was a success., giving TecnoFerrari the possibility of growing and moving toward other kinds of machines, reaching over the years, the position of leader in stocking systems. But at Fiorano we do not rest on our laurels, success is instead a stimulus for thinking even bigger. Eight years of work and research to create, beside the factory where TecnoFerrari machines are designed and constructed, Tecnotiles, a workshop-factory, a real and proper ceramics centre in miniature in which to experiment a revolutionary system of manufacturing tiles: press-glazing. A layer of powered glaze over a layer of high quality, powered clay. Total anchorage between the two parts is formed that, completed with 1220°C sintering, allows obtaining an exceptional product. The pilot-factory was a model that provided the possibility of designing, checking and correcting innovative systems applied to all phases of the productive process. Giancarlo Ferrari acquired, with this creation, a top post in the history of industrial and technological development of the Sassolese territory. And in that period, for those who work in ceramics, Sassuolo was the centre of the world.

Self-effacing and reserved, Giancarlo became famous not only for his inventions but also for his generosity with which he circulated ideas and shared his knowledge. Acknowledging due proportion, we find the same spirit in him that led Albert Bruce Sabin not to patent the vaccine he had created against poliomyelitis, so that the largest possible number of people could use it. When at the beginning of the 90’s Tecnotiles ceased activity, TecnoFerrari had by now acquired among the most complete and organic know-how of porcelain production systems, but, above all, a unique competence in the world of stocking systems. It is by now a company of reference having clients throughout the world, and closely cooperates with other leader companies in the sector of automation for ceramics.