Olimpia Splendid 🇮🇹

Olimpia Splendid was born in 1956 in Gualtieri, in the plain of Reggio Emilia, when Elviro Marchesi began manufacturing inexpensive stoves and wood and coal ranges in a craft workshop. In the sixties the company already had an industrial scale and was a reference in heating appliances; the oil crisis of the seventies sparked demand for alternative stoves and made it grow strongly. But when the energy scare passed, the market sank and the over‑sized company entered serious financial difficulties.

The turning point came in 1989: Roberto Saccone and his father‑in‑law Giovanni Dalla Bona entered with a capital increase and 50 % of the company (the Marchesi family retained 49 %). Dalla Bona, who came from small appliances, had found that the cost of his materials equaled the price at which Chinese manufacturers sold the finished product, and decided to bet on a sector with more potential: residential air conditioning, then nascent in Italy. That year the company had a turnover of about 12 000 million lira.

In the nineties, Olimpia Splendid positioned itself as the second portable air‑conditioning seller in Italy (its portable units now form the Dolceclima family), and in 1998 it patented the product that would make it famous: the Unico, the first fixed climate unit without an outdoor unit. The entire machine, evaporator and condenser included, fits inside a single wall‑mounted housing; it communicates with the exterior only through two 16‑20 cm holes covered with grilles. For historic Italian city centres, where hanging a motor on the façade is unthinkable, it was a providential solution, and it continues to be manufactured in Italy with variants such as Unico Twin, Unico Pro, Unico Vertical or Unico Air.

The headquarters and main factory are now in Cellatica (Brescia), with a second plant in Pieve di Bono (Trento) and the logistics warehouse in the original Gualtieri. Marco Saccone, son of Roberto, joined in 2009, when turnover was around 45 million euros; in 2018 the Alto Partners fund entered to support the expansion, and the family later bought back the entire capital. In 2025 the group had a turnover of about 130 million euros, employed 200 people, exported more than half of its production to 48 countries and invested around 5 % in R&D.

Roberto Saccone summed up the company's philosophy like this: “The search for beauty set this adventure in motion. We chose to invest in design in a sector that historically had paid little attention to aesthetics.” Hence the Dolceclima laptops, the Bi2 fan coils, or the Sherpa heat pumps. In Spain it operates from Olimpia Splendid Ibérica, S.L., based in San Fernando de Henares (Madrid), one of its six commercial subsidiaries alongside France, China, the United States and Australia.

Pending verification

The exact year of entry into air conditioning could not be confirmed (the company speaks generically of “the eighties”) nor the opening date of the Spanish subsidiary.

History machine-translated from Spanish. Can you improve it? Write to us.