The following is a long-term excursus on the health of workers and therefore also on the characters who in the various periods animated the special technical-scientific branches known as occupational hygiene, industrial hygiene and occupational medicine in Italy. On the other hand, it will be mentioned how the people directly involved, that is the workers, their supporters and their own organizations, have lived and influenced the events concerning the work-health system. The aim is to highlight not only or not so much the working conditions and suffering, damage and pathologies that have characterized the various generations of Italian workers as well as the "ideas" of work expressed over time by the actors in the field, such as these have been accepted in the laws, regulations and prevailing standards and how these have been able, gradually but in a never homogeneous and definitive way, to affirm the tendency to carry out a "healthy", "satisfactory" work and also to propose the smart factory.