DIH Feb 2022

Experimenting with 4.0 Technology: Chirale and Cartografica Visceglia

An example of how the 'testing before investing' services of the Digital Innovation Hub at FabLab Ostiense can support the 4.0 Transition of artisan businesses.

Cartografica Visceglia is a historic Roman company, founded in 1929 by the renowned cartographer Prof. Vincenzo Visceglia, to whom a street in Rome is also dedicated.

During the 1930s, Professor Visceglia managed to turn his passion into a promising business, as he himself wrote: “hence the great love for terrestrial physics and therefore for geographic maps led him to decide that these should not be available only to a chosen few and to a few cultured people, but to a great majority — within everyone’s reach.”

Since then, the maps produced by Cartografica Visceglia have been sold throughout Italy, and the company’s development has spanned three generations, with an offering that has transformed and adapted to new market scenarios.

Alongside the traditional educational and tourist maps, new products were added — from antique maps used as decorative elements to laminated maps supporting geomarketing activities.

In the era of digital cartography and navigation systems, Cartografica Visceglia has managed to maintain its market leadership without going through any crisis, constantly innovating its offering, valuing its historical heritage and focusing on the high artisan quality of its products.

The company is today led by Laura Ottaviani, granddaughter of the founder, a brilliant entrepreneur with a strong spirit of innovation, who has been able to seize the opportunities offered by new digital technologies.

As part of the support programme for innovative companies in the area that we are running in partnership with our trade association, CNA di Roma, we hosted Cartografica Visceglia in our Digital Innovation Hub Ostiense for an experimentation with the new digital InkJet and UV printing technologies, and with new innovative materials selected from our materials library.

The goal was to develop new production processes capable of improving and optimising the most innovative products the company offers its customers.

Our laboratory in fact features new-generation CNC machines compliant with the new Industry 4.0 standards, which enable the management of production cycles with a high degree of customisation and integrated with other business processes.

Visceglia is an artisan business with a very high level of maturity in the use of digital technologies.

A significant share of sales takes place through the e-commerce site, and the entire cartographic heritage is digitised.

The FabLab Ostiense is a precious source of inspiration, allowing the analysis of thousands of different materials to be combined with the experimentation of different processing technologies. The same digital file can generate tens of thousands of different processes, with unique effects depending on the printing technique and the substrate used.

The search for innovative processes and products is facilitated by the availability of a large number of fabrication machines and technologies, which can be used directly by the laboratory’s users or, in more complex cases, with the support of a specialised technician.

Specific instruments for analysing the quality of products and semi-finished items, including a metallographic stereo microscope, allow immediate evaluation of the outcomes of the experiments.

In the span of a single working day, it was possible to reach the first results, achieving the printing of an antique map of the City of Rome on materials never used before by the company.

The activities carried out together with Cartografica Visceglia are an excellent example of the services that a Digital Innovation Hub like FabLab Ostiense can offer companies that intend to begin the transition towards a new industrial model.

Defining new development and production processes and acquiring new machines requires significant investment that makes the subsequent path critical, especially for artisan-sized businesses.

Even when the investment is supported by funds and support measures, simply venturing onto an innovation path that does not reach the expected goals can prove to be a point of no return, due to lost time and the imbalance of business activities.

The Digital Hub offers companies the opportunity to experiment with processes and technologies before proceeding with the investment (testing before investing), allowing the development of an innovation project whose results are guaranteed by the research phase carried out in the laboratory.