In his company, apart from managers and technicians, he enrolled a large number of artists like writers and architects, following his interest in design and urban and building planning that were closely linked with his personal utopian vision.

Olivetti's formative years were spent under the tutelage of his mother, daughter of the local Waldensian pastor, an educated and sober woman.

[citation needed] After graduation in chemical engineering at the Polytechnic University of Turin in 1924, Olivetti joined the company for a short while.

When he became undesirable to Benito Mussolini's Italian fascist regime, his father sent him to the United States to learn the roots of American industrial power.

With the approval of father, he organized the production system at Olivetti on a quasi-Taylorian model and transformed the shop into a factory with departments and divisions.

[citation needed] In 1931, he visited the Soviet Union and created an Advertising Department at Olivetti that worked with artists and designers.

He supervised a housing plan for the workers at Ivrea, a small city near Turin, where the Olivetti plant is still located,[5] and a zoning proposal for the adjacent Aosta Valley.

During World War II, he participated in the underground anti-fascist and Italian resistance movements, was jailed, and at the end sought refuge in Switzerland.

[6] During the immediate post-war years, the Olivetti empire expanded rapidly, only to be briefly on the verge of bankruptcy after the acquisition of Underwood Typewriter Company in the late 1950s.

Olivetti shared his time between business pursuits and attempts to practice and spread the utopian ideal of community life.

We know that he also collaborated with "Tempi Nuovi," the Turin political weekly promoted by his father along with Donato Bachi (who became its director) and other progressives.

In 1924, he earned a degree in chemical engineering from the Polytechnic of Turin and, after a study trip to the United States with Domenico Burzio (Technical Director of Olivetti), where he updated himself on organizational business practices, he joined his father's factory in 1926.

Adriano's anti-fascism had already been expressed immediately after the discovery of Giacomo Matteotti's body in the demonstration he organized, together with his father, at the Giacosa theater in Ivrea in 1924.

He stopped for the night at the home of Giuseppe Pero, an executive at Olivetti, and left the next morning in a car driven by Adriano, which reached Savona, where Pertini awaited them.

From 1931, the Aosta police (from whom the entrepreneur needed certification of Aryan race membership due to his father's Jewish origins) defined the young Olivetti as subversive.

Adriano Olivetti was later appointed General Manager and, alongside assuming responsibilities in the Ivrea factory, demonstrated greater caution toward the regime.

This was one of the cultural turning points for Adriano because in Milan, he could meet the intelligentsia that later brought him closer to architecture, urban planning, psychology, and sociology.

We do not know with how much conviction, but it is proven that Adriano Olivetti was definitively removed from the central political record in 1937 and requested—and obtained—a membership card from the National Fascist Party (PNF).

Prudent enough not to be expelled like Massimo Rocca, Bottai was still a free spirit representing the other side of fascism, the less totalitarian and more problematic one.

However, these qualities did not prevent Bottai from being a staunch promoter of the Manifesto of Race and one of the most fanatical supporters of fascist racial laws.

In any case, the plan for the Aosta Valley had another exhibition in Rome, and newspapers covered it, as evidenced by a letter that Camillo wrote to Adriano.

Alongside his managerial skills that made Olivetti the world's leading office products company, he combined an insatiable thirst for research and experimentation on how to harmonize industrial development with the assertion of human rights and participatory democracy, both inside and outside the factory.

In 1945, Olivetti published The Political Order of Communities, considered the theoretical basis for a federalist idea of the state, which, in his vision, was based on communities—territorial units that were culturally homogeneous and economically autonomous.

He became a supporter of European federalism after meeting Altiero Spinelli during his exile in Switzerland, initiated by Olivetti in 1944 due to his anti-fascist activities.