Numbers are important

The history of the Dalpasso laboratories comes from the intuition of Curzio Dalpasso.
Born in Ravenna in 1922, he was a technician in “Officine Reggiane”, a historical Reggio Emilia based company.

At the end of the Second World War, due to widespread unemployment and the many victims of war injuries, Curzio Dalpasso had the intuition that completely changed his life and the lives of everyone working for this company: He began the manufactoring and the application of ocular prostheses made of acrylic resin, a material that had reached Italy just a few years beforehand.
Prostheses constructed up to then had been made of glass, a really unsuitable material for obtaining a good aesthetic and functional result.
In fact, resin prostheses were an immediate success.

The company’s first certificate of incorporation dated 1958

Already in 1952 a small laboratory was opened in Reggio Emilia,with the help of a young colleague he had met at Officine Reggiane, Paola Firenzuoli, who had in the meantime become his wife. The couple were among the first in Italy to produce and apply acrylic resin ocular prostheses and Laboratori Oftalmotecnici Dalpasso (the company’s original name) also concentrated on the production of PMMA contact lenses, both corneal and scleral, for correcting ametropia and corneal alterations that were difficult to correct at the time, such as  keratoconus, aniridia, aphakia, coloboma, atrophy of the eye bulb, etc.

The workshop increased the employees number soon and developed partnerships with most of the ophthalmologists and plastic surgeons and maxillofacial, sensitive and interested in this new branch of surgery. In a few years Laboratories Dalpasso became synonymous with Handmade artificial eyes and landmark for patients who were not satisfied with most of the old glass prosthesis or with a standardized form.

Agreement with the National
Opera War Invalids of 1966

The headquarters in Reggio Emilia, today

In 1990, after forty years’ business, Laboratori became a limited liability company. Since 1991, the year in which the founder Curzio Dalpasso passed away, his wife Paola Firenzuoli has been our chairwoman.

DALPASSO S.r.l. is now a modern company, with the largest operational site in Europe and makes use of highly specialist prosthetic technicians.
Dalpasso s.r.l. is the unrivalled leader in Italy – every year over seven thousand patients are examined – but it has made the decision to maintain the quality and prestige of personalised hand crafted prostheses, like it did back in 1950, keeping alive an idea that is still valid and has never faded.