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Exposizione Internazionale d’Industria e de Laboro, Turin 1911

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Exposizione Internazionale d’Industria e de Laboro, Turin 1911

The Turin International Exposition of Industry and Labor ran from 29 April to 19 November 1911. It was one of three exhibitions marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Kingdom of Italy, proclaimed in Turin in March 1861. Under a joint manifesto issued in January 1908 by the mayors of Turin and Rome, Secondo Frola and Ernesto Nathan, the former capitals divided the celebration. Turin took industry and labor; Rome took fine arts, archaeology, regional ethnography and the Risorgimento; and Florence held a historical portrait exhibition and an international horticulture show. The King and Queen opened the fair in the Salone dei Festeggiamenti, joined by Prime Minister Giolitti, cabinet ministers and the foreign ambassadors. A construction workers’ strike had delayed the works, and the official jury report concedes the fair opened before it was fully installed.

The grounds spread along both banks of the Po around the Parco del Valentino, covering about 1.2 million square meters, with roughly 350,000 under roof; later sources differ somewhat on the area. The architects Pietro Fenoglio, Stefano Molli and Giacomo Salvadori di Wiesenhof gave the site a unified look modeled on Turin’s eighteenth-century baroque. Visitors crossed a monumental bridge with a moving walkway, rode an aerial railway, and saw an illuminated cascade on the hillside. According to some sources, there were 125 buildings, and 37 nations and colonies participated, the Hungarian, British, German and French pavilions were among the largest. A full season of concerts, congresses and competitions included a film competition and the Rome–Turin air race.

La Stampa reported 7,409,145 visitors over the fair’s run, with 241,015 on the closing day alone. A lower figure of about 4.0 million appears in at least one later exhibition list; it may reflect paid vs. total visitors. The fair closed against a changed political backdrop: Italy had invaded Libya at the end of September, while the exposition was still running.

The parallel Rome exposition, called the International Exhibition of Art (Esposizione internazionale d’arte), also celebrating the anniversary, opened on March 27 and closing on December 1. Attendance was disappointing because of poor weather and a cholera epidemic. However, the Roman National Museum grew out of this exhibition.

The Incubator Exhibit

It is known from one of Alexandre Lion’s typical souvenir postcards that he had an incubator exhibit at the Turin 1911 Exposition, although mentions of the exhibit in contemporary accounts are scanty, and no photographs of the pavilion have been found. Writing in Treves’s illustrated Le Esposizioni del 1911 under the pen name “Toga-rasa,” a columnist surveyed the fair’s favorite gathering places. He named the “chiosco delle incubatrici dei bambini nati prima del tempo” (the kiosk of the incubators for babies born before their time) alongside the Hungarian pavilion and the music pavilion. The piece is humorous, but it shows the exhibit was open within about six weeks of the opening and was drawing crowds.

In the same publication’s closing essay, Paolo Arcari mentioned that he was handed a handbill for the incubators on first entering the fair, and he remembered seeing the same system “in the same place” at the Turin exposition of 1898. He placed the exhibit between the Palazzo del Giornale and the Galleria delle Macchine e del Lavoro. He also lists the incubator kiosk among the few survivors of the 1898 fair, with the medieval castle and fountains. Unfortunately, I have not found the exhibit labeled on any map of the 1911 exposition. It was clearly labeled on the map of the 1898 exposition, but in a different location, so Arcari’s “same place” is best interpreted as being in the same area of the grounds rather than the same footprint.

Source: Author’s collection.
Map of the exposition. Source: The Turin Project.

Primary Sources

  • Toga-rasa [pseud.], “Ritrovi preferiti all’esposizione di Torino,” in Guido Treves, ed., Le Esposizioni del 1911: Roma, Torino, Firenze. Rassegna illustrata delle Mostre indette nelle tre Capitali per solennizzare il Cinquantenario del Regno d’Italia (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1911), pp. 244–246, at 246; datelined “Torino, giugno.” Consulted 12 Oct 2026. (Press; humorous column; independent of the operator.)
  • Paolo Arcari, “Concludendo: 1898–1911–19…,” in Treves, Le Esposizioni del 1911, pp. 431–432, at 431. Consulted 12 Oct 2026. (Press; signed retrospective essay, written autumn 1911 before the fair closed; firsthand recollection of both 1898 and 1911.)
  • “La chiusura dell’Esposizione: Il saluto; L’ultima giornata, 241.015 visitatori,” La Stampa (Turin), 20 Nov 1911, p. 5. https://archive.org/details/lastampa_1911-11-20, retrieved 12 Oct 2026. (Press; reports official attendance figures.)
  • “Il programma d’oggi,” La Stampa (Turin), daily, May–Nov 1911, generally p. 4 under “All’Esposizione.” Internet Archive, lastampa_1911 series, retrieved 12 Oct 2026. (Press; negative finding, lists fee-charging exhibits only.)
  • Esposizione internazionale dell’industria e del lavoro, Torino 1911: Relazione della Giuria (Turin: Officine Grafiche della S.T.E.N., 1915), p. 6. https://www.museotorino.it/resources/pdf/books/422.1/files/assets/common/downloads/publication.pdf, retrieved 12 Oct 2026. (Official; inauguration details.)
  • “L’Exposition internationale de Turin en 1911,” extract from Almanacco Italiano 1911 (Florence: R. Bemporad & Figlio, 1911). (Organizer-adjacent promotional description written before the opening.)

Secondary Sources

  • Thomas Renard, “Les expositions internationales italiennes de 1911 et le partage de la capitalité,” preprint, 2018, HAL hal-01859410, https://univ-rennes.hal.science/hal-01859410/document, retrieved 12 Oct 2026.
  • Cristina Della Coletta, World’s Fairs Italian Style: The Great Expositions in Turin and Their Narratives, 1860–1915 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), ch. 2.
  • Giacomo Domini, “Exhibitions, patents, and innovation in the early twentieth century: evidence from the Turin 1911 International Exhibition,” European Review of Economic History 24, no. 3 (2020): 578–600, https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/hez004.
  • Turin 1911: The World’s Fair in Italy (University of California, San Diego, and Politecnico di Torino), https://italyworldsfairs.org/, retrieved 12 Oct 2026.
  • John Harman, “A List of World Exhibitions,” http://www.studygroup.org.uk/Archives/39/A%20LIST%20OF%20WORLD%20EXHIBITIONS%203.html, cited via French Wikipedia, retrieved 12 Oct 2026.

More Information about Alexandre Lion

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Last Updated on 10/13/26