FOCUS ON CAE | Celebrating the past to look into the future: the Franco Bertolani museum

CAE was born in 1977 from the will of four electronic telecommunications engineers and researchers of the Marconi Foundation, with a very specific purpose: providing public and private bodies with the most advanced technologies for monitoring the environmental risk caused by natural phenomena. 

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of CAE, we created a company museum named after one of its four founding partners: Engineer Franco Bertolani, who passed away in August 2016 and always wanted to dedicate a space to the exhibition of items that have made the history of CAE.

Actually, today CAE is the leading Italian company in many services such as design, construction and maintenance of systems and technologies for multi-hazard monitoring and alert.

CAE constantly invests in the development of reliable, innovative and interoperable technologies aiming at the protection of the territory for civil protection purposes.

CAE has never backed away in case of installations in significantly inhospitable environments, such as:

- Antarctica;
- K2;
- the Capanna Margherita on the top of Monte Rosa (at 4556 m a.s.l.);
- oil platforms.

CAE has always proved to be able to intervene professionally even during important emergency situations, such as:

- the flood in Valtellina (1987); 
- the landslide in Sarno (1998);
- the threat of Lake Effimero on the municipality of Macugnaga (2002) etc.

The museum was thus created to guide visitors in the discovery of CAE, starting from the milestones that made it what it is.

A space of about 80 m² was therefore recreated, connected to the training room, which houses about forty historical items.

The evolution of CAE has seen the expansion of the sectors of intervention where it operates.

Starting from the hydrometeorological sector, the company also dealt with the management of gates, water quality monitoring, landslides, wildfires, up to multi-hazard systems capable of integrating all the different systems in a single one that includes alert functions, too.

The museum is set to retrace the essential milestones of these first 40 years: the challenges faced and the evolution of its products.

The exhibition showcases items including peripheral stations and hydrometers, software and the latest generation technologies, without neglecting the pieces made for the calibration of the instruments and to verify the real radio coverage in the field.

Finally, moving to the adjacent internal courtyard, which is also presented as an exhibition space, it is possible to take a look at the present of CAE: visitors will be able to observe some of the main latest generation products, suitable for monitoring different types of risk and thanks to which, today as in 1977, CAE is ready to face whatever challenges may arise with enthusiasm and therefore guarantee excellence of results.

A museum is certainly not enough to enclose and summarize 40 years of intense commitment and research, but it is certainly a good starting point to arouse the curiosity of our visitors.

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