People and work. The twentieth-century

At the beginning of the twentieth century the inhabitants of Chieri numbered 13,803. This would increase to 15,000 people by 1950. From the beginning of the 1960’s the mass migration of people from the south to the industrialized towns in the North saw the population double (30,511 in 1971). Most of them were employed in the textile manufacturing industry. In 1971 there was a total of 206 textile factories. This number was destined to fall due to the eventual crises in this sector and today there are approximately ten that are still working. Thanks to the migratory influx, mass urban development took place from 1956 to 1964, not all of it well-planned. One look at the view of the town from “La Rocca di San Giorgio” was  enough to see that Chieri was no more “ the town of red roofs” as it had been at the end of nineteenth-century.