Neri Filippo & C. snc

Neri Filippo e C. Snc has always been investing in the reasearch and development of cutting-edge machines in order to meet its clients’ needs, respecting the environment.

The cutting-edge plants that increase the conditions of the full bottles during the packaging are created and produced in the facility and then sold all over the world.

When Filippo Neri was a kid assembled and disassembled, without mistakes, his father’s bicycle: born in 1945, Sicilian origins and the name of a saint, has always had the desire to experiment…and he found a job soon and by chance.
He remembers: “I was 14 years old when I went to the city square in Canelli with my father, who hoped to meet Sirio Aliberti to ask him a job for his eldest son.

“Cio”, that’s what we called Aliberti, looked at me and said: I hire him.

That’s how the story of Filippo Neri begins. At the Sirio Aliberti’s company he works at the lathe to “whiten”, i.e. cleaning the surface, then he begins to travel all around Piedmont with the manager of the company to install autoclaves.

At the age of 17, the first change: “One day Pietro Careddu, the one of the corks, went to the workshop, he saw me working and asked me to join his company. I didn’t mind to change so I said yes”.

He is still a trainee and at that time the contract provided theory lessons at school on Mondays. “When Careddu heard about it, he said “He’s not a trainee anymore, this is already a workman” and changed my contract’.

Then he went to work at Cavagnino&Gatti, before deciding, in his early twenties, to set up his own company: he bought a lathe and rented a place in Santo Stefano Belbo. “I did maintenance in the cellars, I was specialised in repairing pumps, I had a good business, they even called me in Savona.

The strangest requests came to him and he gets ingenious. Once he made a sort of mould to make ‘balon’ balls, the elastic ball, the national sport from around here. “Another time, the son of Camulen from Cossano comes to me, the one from the restaurant, they used to call him the ‘German’: he tells me that his grandmother can’t roll pasta any more, her hands hurt.

So I went to Ponzio’s, the junkyard in Nizza, found an electric motor, connected it to the pedal of a sewing machine.

The whole thing made the machines work to make noodles: a craft system, but it worked’.

But the work he did at Careddu was still in his thoughts. ‘I wanted to build a machine that would automate the work of making corks, gluing and pressing the different parts of the cork’.

It took nine months to go from the idea to the machine: ‘I sold it to Ilas, the cork factory that belonged to one of Pietro Careddu’s daughters, and was in Pavese’s birthplace: it made 3,000 corks an hour when manually they produced 1,500 in half a day’.

This was not enough: the caps on the machines were oriented manually, to be directed onto the mouth of the bottle, a time-consuming task; the automation was needed to keep up with the new filling machines: the first automatic cap orienting machine with the ‘Neri’ brand name was born.
“I had found two engineers from Fiat who helped me with the electronics, but I did everything else”.

In 1982, he returned to Canelli where he acquired part of a warehouse in a side street of Via Asti and started the company “Neri Filippo”, which produces machinery for every need, from bottling to packaging to bottle recovery.

Today there are his sons Alessandro and Federico in the workshop, but he has not stopped working.

“We are specialised in making special machines,” he says with a smile and tells of special requests for the Japanese market. Also in the catalogue there are machines for the automatic remuage of bottles according to the classical method contained in special cages. 
Requests arrive from Japan and France, Ecuador and the big Italian wineries.
And this is where machines with curious names come from: the cap orientator ‘Grazia’ (after his wife who helps out in the company by managing the administrative side), or the AlFe (from the initials of their children), and then GaMa, Myr and Son inspired by the names of their grandchildren Gabriel, Matteo, Myriam and Sonia.