ICI Caldaie Brand Guidelines: A 1958 Boiler Maker From Campagnola di Zevio, Verona

A workshop in the Verona plain.

ICI Caldaie began in 1958, when Remigio Lucchini founded the company at Campagnola di Zevio, a village in the province of Verona, according to the history on the company’s website. The company says it all started with a water heater; domestic boilers followed, then boilers for central heating, and in time larger systems built to supply the energy that factories need.

The company’s own timeline marks 1983 as the year ICI Caldaie went from an artisanal business to an industrial one. Alongside its steel boilers, it says, it was then Italy’s second-largest producer of LPG tanks, and it made its first sales abroad. In 1995, to keep up with growing production and exports, it industrialised the making of wall-hung boilers with a model called Snella.

Expansion abroad came step by step. ICI Caldaie says it opened its first direct branch, in the United Kingdom, in 1997, entered the Russian and Kazakh markets in 2003, and was exporting to 59 countries by 2009. Its timeline adds the United States two years before 2015, the year it opened a sales office in Singapore, and distribution in Vietnam and Guatemala in 2019.

The move into industrial steam is dated to 2000, which the company calls the first phase of industrialising its steam generators, from hand-built units to ranges such as GX and Sixen. Those two names are still in its catalogue today.

Later milestones on the timeline are about methods and markets as much as products: lean-production projects across the factory and offices in 2016, the first studies of capturing carbon dioxide in 2019, and, in 2020, the first ICI systems sold in Europe with its own NEOX burners and remote monitoring.

Steam, hot water and thermal oil.

Today ICI Caldaie presents itself as a maker of industrial boilers. Its catalogue groups them as steam boilers, hot-water boilers, superheated-water boilers, heat-recovery boilers and thermal-oil boilers, with a separate line of commercial boilers, condensing and non-condensing, and its own modulating burners. The company describes its steam boilers as fire-tube designs, built as three-pass or flame-reversal units, for instant, low-pressure and high-pressure steam, with outputs it gives as running from 50 to 32,000 kilograms an hour.

The steam ranges now carry names including Evosteam, Ecovapor, GX and Sixen N. Ecovapor, launched in 2017, is described by the company as a steam system that combines boiler and burner in a single compact unit, a project it says was conceived and developed entirely in-house. Ecovapor 2.0 and the NEOX modulating gas burner followed in 2021, according to its timeline, and in September 2025 its news page announced Evosteam, a three-pass steam generator in 13 models.

The company lists the sectors it serves as chemicals and pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, manufacturing, oil and gas, district heating, water treatment, healthcare and hospitality, and residential buildings. Its website also offers pre-sale services such as turnkey boiler rooms and the rental of industrial generators, plus after-sales support, spare parts and testing.

On certification, ICI Caldaie says it has run a quality management system based on ISO 9001 since 1994, and holds ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 certification, CE marking and, for export, certificates from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). It also lists national product approvals for markets including Europe, the United States, China and Kazakhstan.

How boiler makers present themselves.

Industrial boiler makers sell equipment that most people never see. A steam boiler sits in a plant room behind a hospital, a brewery, a laundry or a paper mill, and the people who buy one are engineers, facility managers and contractors. So the visual language of the category is built for a technical reader: catalogues, data sheets, project case studies and trade-show stands rather than shop windows.

The most common image is the boiler itself in a clean plant room. A packaged fire-tube boiler is usually shown as a long horizontal shell, painted and insulated, with its burner on the front, a control panel at eye level and the flue rising behind it. Around it run steam headers, valves and lagged pipework, photographed under even light so that every joint reads clearly. Cutaway drawings do the explaining: a shell opened along its length to show the furnace tube and the passes of smaller tubes, or a water-tube unit drawn with its drums and banks of tubes exposed.

The second register is the factory. Makers show shells being rolled from steel plate, welders at work on tube sheets, finished units on low-loader trailers and large boilers lifted by crane on site. These pictures stress scale and fabrication skill. Many firms in the category are old, and their histories lean on heritage photographs: riveted boilers, steam-era works yards, early advertisements and the first catalogues.

The customers appear too, usually as settings rather than people: a utility’s turbine hall, a food plant with stainless pipework, a district-heating station, a hospital service yard. Colour is mostly restrained, with greys, navy, white and one strong corporate accent, and type is set in plain sans or engineering-style faces chosen to sit comfortably beside drawings and specification tables.

A laboratory alongside the boiler works.

Research has become a large part of how ICI Caldaie describes itself. Its timeline dates its first studies of hydrogen to 2003, the expansion of its research laboratory to 2004, in-house work on fuel-processing systems that make hydrogen from methane to 2005, and its first European Union funding, for a hydrogen cogeneration project called H2OME, to 2008. Its research pages speak of twenty years of European projects, with work on fuel-cell cogeneration and on reactors for producing hydrogen, and its list of funded projects includes support from the Veneto region’s 2021–2027 European regional development programme.

An independent account supports the outline. In December 2020 the Verona newspaper L’Adige profiled the company, naming Emanuela Lucchini as its president. The paper reported that the laboratory at Campagnola di Zevio was developing, and bringing to market, cogeneration systems based on fuel cells; that the work had become an internal laboratory in 2005, focused on fuel-cell micro-cogeneration below 100 kilowatts; and that it had led to several patents in fuel processing. L’Adige also wrote that over the years the company had specialised in energy for industry, such as steam boilers for food processing, pharmaceuticals and hospitals, and that it took part each year in projects funded by the European Union.

In 2023 the company changed how it presents itself. Its timeline says ICI Caldaie became ICI Powering Evolution, “no longer just boilers,” and its website now uses the slogan “Powering Evolution” and names innovation, tenacity, precision and safety as its values. The legal company remains ICI Caldaie S.p.A., based at Campagnola di Zevio.

For a design guide, ICI Caldaie shows how a boiler works founded in 1958 can rebuild its name around research without dropping its product ranges. Compare Viessmann, a German heating maker, and Babcock Wanson, a European industrial-boiler name. For this guide we use a deep blue, steam grey and a burner orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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