When the goal is to promote and advance a proper fire safety culture, Mozzanica is always at the forefront of that mission.
For this reason, the company has recently joined IFSN, the Italian Fire Sprinkler Network, an association officially introduced on June 18, 2025, whose goals it fully supports.
We are pleased to present the first part of an interview with the Association’s Founder, Engineer Luciano Nigro.
On June 18, you officially introduced IFSN. How long had you been considering this decision, and what was the driving reason behind it?
The idea goes back several years, and the aim was to represent the automatic sprinkler industry. At the time, in fact, the main promoters were companies like Tyco, Victaulic, Viking, Reliable, Central, and so on.
In Italy, representation of the fire protection industry had been gradually declining. So the only real way to promote the use of these systems, which is ultimately the core objective, was to create an association.
IFSN stands for Italian Fire Sprinkler Network, and it's essentially the Italian counterpart to the European Fire Sprinkler Network, a group established in 2021 through a joint initiative by what was then EUROF, the European association of fire industry representatives, and the AFSA, the American Fire Sprinkler Association.
What path was taken to turn the idea into reality?
Alan Brinson, Secretary of the European Fire Sprinkler Network, had often encouraged me to promote the creation of an Italian association. The real turning point came in 2022 during a conference in Rome, which was attended by various institutions including representatives from the Fire Brigade.
The first thing we needed was the will to make it happen, and that started primarily with me. Soon after, Gianluigi Mussinelli, Sole Administrator of Sebino Fire and Security, joined in.
You could say the three founding members are myself, Gianluigi Mussinelli, and Alan Brinson.
In 2023, we formally established the association as a non-profit organization, deliberately choosing the acronym containing "Sprinkler", with the aim of broadly representing the water-based fire protection sector in all its forms (including water mist, deluge systems, and more).
What’s unique about IFSN is its total independence—we’re not tied to any other organization. We have our own coordinator, Engineer Giorgio Franzini, who accepted the role and has provided valuable support in administrative areas, invoicing, event organization, and so forth.
“Our goal in Italy is to promote the use of sprinklers by leveraging the same channels that have proven successful in other countries.”
The business plan highlights that the Italian market for water-based protection systems is “the most limited in Europe,” but with significant growth potential. What concrete results are you aiming to achieve over the next five years with your organization?
Since its founding, the European Fire Sprinkler Network has been evaluated, using the same terms now commonly applied to assess whether an initiative is successful or not, by the number of sprinklers sold in a given country from one year to the next.
So we, too, will adopt that as a measure of our progress. In 2023, approximately one million sprinklers were sold.
If in five years we reach 1.2 million units, that will already be an increase. The figure is tracked in terms of sprinklers sold per year and per million inhabitants.
At the moment, in absolute numbers, we install fewer sprinklers than Norway, where about 1.4 million sprinklers are installed per year. In Norway, there has been a clear strategic shift, likely influenced by their natural environment, where the widespread use of wood in construction has led to sprinklers being installed in all residential buildings over two stories.
Our aim in Italy is to promote the use of sprinklers through the same channels that have proven successful in other countries. For example, Spain launched an association similar to ours, benefiting greatly from the support of a large and powerful organization: Tecnifuego.