Casagrande Brand Guidelines: The Fontanafredda Drilling-Rig Maker Founded in 1963

A family firm in the province of Pordenone.

Casagrande makes drilling and foundation machines at Fontanafredda, in the province of Pordenone in north-eastern Italy. The company dates itself to 1963 — “Foundation equipment since 1963,” its website says — and the business press gives the same span: when the group changed hands in September 2025, the private-capital news site BeBeez described it as founded sixty years earlier. For those six decades it was owned by the Casagrande family, whose name it carries.

Today the company describes itself as a designer and manufacturer of piling rigs, crawler drills for micropiling, anchoring and jet grouting, diaphragm-wall equipment and machines for consolidating tunnels. It says its range runs to more than 300 configurations, offered both as standard machines and as rigs built for a particular job, and that its equipment works on all six continents. BeBeez wrote in 2025 that the group holds a significant international position in machinery made only for deep foundations, used mainly in infrastructure and renewable energy, with a strong base in Europe and an expansion under way into North America and Asia.

The company’s own pages stress the field over the drawing board. It says its approach “starts from the field,” with machines developed from customer needs and job-site problems, and that close work with contractors lets it keep lead times short. In June 2026 it said that around 90% of its business comes from outside Italy, in a note on an interview its chief executive gave to the Corriere della Sera. Closer to home, it took part in 2026 in a project run by the Istituto Tecnico Tecnologico Kennedy in Pordenone to link the school with local industry, the company says.

Masts, drills and grabs.

Casagrande’s catalogue is organised by machine family. Its piling rigs include the CB series, the XP-2 series — from the B200 up to the B470 — and the C series. Its crawler drills run from the compact C3 to the C16. The CV-T and CV-F multifunctional rigs sit between the two families, and for diaphragm walls it offers the KHD and KRC hydraulic grabs mounted on its rigs. A PG185 heads its tunnelling equipment. The website also groups the machines by the methods they serve, with bored and CFA piles, micropiles, jet grouting and diaphragm walls among them.

The company’s news pages read as a log of job sites. In 2026 it reported a B240 XP-2 building bored piles on the Grassano–Bernalda railway in southern Italy, a CB20 working on bored piles at Madrid’s Ciudad de la Justicia, two C6 XP-2 crawler drills drilling inclined micropiles at the Stewartville Generating Station in Ontario, and a B250 XP-2 with a KRC2 grab building diaphragm walls for the DAG Tower in Sofia. In May 2026 it said it had shipped the first new CB26 to Australia. In Italy it works with rental fleets as well as contractors; one 2026 report described a C4XP-2 rented from LTM Rent drilling micropiles on a railway site in Trieste.

Awards have come from its own trade. On 7 October 2026 in Piacenza, Casagrande received two Italian Drilling & Foundation Awards, the company says: a Green Award for its Smart Power Management system, which adapts engine power to what the machine is doing, and an IT and Digital Innovation Award for C-Brain, which it calls its integrated machine intelligence system. Its certifications page names ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 14001:2015, and it reported renewing both in July 2026. The company exhibits at the trade’s fairs, including Geofluid in Piacenza and SMOPYC in Zaragoza in 2026, and at Geofluid it launched a talk series of its own, DeepTalks.

How the trade presents itself.

Piling and foundation rig makers sell machines that do most of their work out of sight, below ground, so their pictures tend to show what stands above it. The common image is a tall mast rising over a building site, often framed against a city skyline or a half-finished bridge, with the rig itself on crawler tracks in mud, gravel or sand. The height of the mast gives the photograph its shape, and the model code painted on it is often the largest lettering in the frame.

A second set of images is about tools. Augers, drilling buckets, casings, grabs and cutter wheels are laid out in rows or shown close up, clean and freshly painted, so that the parts that will disappear into the ground can be seen at all. Vibratory hammers, clamps and power packs are photographed the same way, as objects on their own, before they are lifted by a crane.

Trade fairs matter in this category. The bauma show in Munich is where makers stage large stands, with rigs raised to full height under the hall roof or on the open-air grounds, and where new models, electric versions and anniversaries are announced. Stand design, banners and the colour of the machines themselves are part of how a maker is recognised there.

Many of these companies also carry a family or founder’s name, or grew out of a contractor’s own workshop, and their histories are told through dates, places and model numbers rather than slogans. For this series we look at how each maker presents that history, using an unofficial palette and a stand-in typeface, and reproducing no machine, logo or nameplate.

From family ownership to a club deal.

In September 2025 ownership passed from the Casagrande family to a club deal of entrepreneurs, with private and institutional investors, led by Edoardo Lanzavecchia and Riccardo Monti, BeBeez reported on 10 September 2025. The club deal acquired the whole capital of Casagrande S.p.A., while the family reinvested through companies represented by Sergio and Mauro Casagrande and kept what the parties called a significant stake. Sergio Casagrande became chairman of the group, and Fausto Carboni, formerly chief executive of the gearbox maker Bonfiglioli, became chief executive. BeBeez said the new owners aimed to strengthen the company’s position in deep foundations both organically and through acquisitions.

The company has since spoken of the “confirmed commitment of the founding family.” In September 2026 it held its first Investor Day at its headquarters, where investors from the club deal heard a corporate presentation and toured the production facilities, it says. Casagrande S.p.A. remains based in Fontanafredda, and its website lists dealers across Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Australia. Its motto there is “Drill deep and grow.”

For a design guide, Casagrande shows how a family name on a works can carry on after a change of owner, with the catalogue and the job sites doing most of the talking. Compare Soilmec, another Italian maker of drilling rigs, and Comacchio, from the Veneto. For this guide we use a clay red, a steel grey and an olive with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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