Capolavori di Torino is a research and archival reuse project by Nicola Nunziata, commissioned by the Museo Nazionale dell’Automobile for the Centro Storico Fiat. The artist traces and valorizes the historical and cultural memory of the Fiat and Lancia Apprentice Schools—institutions dedicated to training a working-class elite through what was, for its time, an innovative method. The institutional heritage held at the Centro Storico Fiat archives has been expanded with a new collection created by Nunziata from materials gathered through Ex Allievi Cercasi ("Former Apprentices Wanted"): a public census that invited former apprentices and their families to share photographs, notebooks, memorabilia, and oral histories, bringing previously dormant private archives and stories to light.

The objects created by the apprentices as technical tests during their training—demonstrating the practical skills they had acquired—were known as "capolavori" (masterpieces). As revived here, the term expands to encompass a broader idea of excellence and commitment, a semantic reactivation that bridges the worker's manual gesture with the museum and publishing spheres.

Conceived as a further expansion of the project, the volume is a hybrid between an exhibition document and an artist’s book: an experimental, dense, and layered publishing structure that reimagines the traditional catalog format. Maurizio Torchio’s text provides an introduction to the educational and social context of these institutions, created to train a class of top-tier technicians within a rapidly expanding industrial system. Francesco Zanot contextualizes the practice of reuse and archival research in contemporary art, offering a critical analysis of Nunziata’s operations. Vincenzo Estremo reinterprets the "masterpieces" through the lens of hyperobjects: total artifacts that verge on sculpture, small monuments that restore visibility to the worker as a unique subjectivity.

Suggesting a cross-disciplinary perspective that weaves together art, design, and archival research, the book as an object serves as both a repository of the project’s poetics and a new artwork in its own right: its materials, format, binding, paper, and visual layout document an artistic practice rooted in an emotional connection to archives, treating them as dynamic material rather than static monuments.