Recanati is famous, above all, for being the birthplace of the great poet Giacomo Leopardi. Still, it is also home to a Made in Italy excellence that we will learn about today. We are talking, of course, about Clementoni, the historic toy and educational board game company founded by Mario Clementoni, “the Sapientino man.”
Playing is serious business
Mario Clementoni, born in 1925, worked in the field of musical instruments and, during one of his first trips to America, discovered that board games, then almost entirely unknown in Italy, were very popular in the United States. Convinced that ‘playing is a serious thing,’ he began making a board game inspired by Sanremo songs at home with his wife.
But the big hit came in 1967 with Sapientino (a name chosen to evoke learning), a Clementoni’s milestone and Italy’s first electronic board game. Sapientino still exists today and has become a brand in its own right, known throughout Europe. What’s more, the term is included in some Italian dictionaries!
A string of successes
The success story was just beginning. In the ’70s Walt Disney licensed Clementoni and Pippo Olimpionico, another best seller in the catalog, was launched.
Mago Silvan, who was a hugely popular television personality at the time, was one of the company’s first brand ambassadors; year after year, the company continued to churn out hit products such as Concilia?, a game about road safety.
In the 1980s, it was the turn of Insieme, a sort of Trivial Pursuit with the unique feature that Mario Clementoni personally commissioned the drafting of the questions to various figures of the time, famous in a wide variety of fields. These included: Giulio Andreotti, Sandro Ciotti, Piero Angela, Renzo Arbore, Maurizio Costanzo and Jas Gawronski.
A company that doesn’t stop playing
Today, Clementoni, still headquartered in Recanati, is Italy’s leading manufacturer of educational toys and games and is run by Giovanni and Stefano Clementoni. The company, whose slogan is “Growing up is a wonderful game”, employs hundreds of people, has a turnover of millions of euros, produces products in 16 languages, and exports throughout Europe.
Educational toys, of course, have also evolved to keep pace with the times, and today the company offers a range of computers that closely resemble the real thing, helping children to explore the digital world. However, Stefano Clementoni firmly believes that “toys must remain linked to dreams”, and we can only congratulate those who, day in, day out, bring the Italian spirit of play and imagination to the world!
Discover other outstanding companies from Marche.