"Pietro Barilla was born in Parma on April 16, 1913. After graduating from middle school, he completed his experience with two years of study in Germany.
From 1931 he joined his father in the company dealing with sales and communication.
After taking part in the Russian Campaign, and with the end of the war, he leads the company together with his brother Gianni in a phase of development and technological innovation including the construction of the Pedrignano plant, which started operating in 1969. From 1980 until his death, on 13 September 1993, will lead Barilla to a strong development also in the European markets.
The love for culture, and in particular for art, had always accompanied his entrepreneurial activity. Since the post-war years, Pietro Barilla's support for Parma's cultural life has been significant, alongside figures such as Attilio Bertolucci, Pietro Bianchi, Erberto Carboni, Carlo Mattioli, Roberto Tassi.
As an art gallery it uses the offices, and the lawn surrounding the Pedrignano plant is embellished over the years with sculptures, such as the monument "Fields of wheat", by Pietro Cascella, laid in 1982 to commemorate 100 years of work by the Business.
Whoever walks through the offices today can enjoy a permanent exhibition made up of over 300 works, personally selected by Pietro Barilla, which embrace the history of twentieth-century art, touching on artistic currents and movements from Divisionism to Surrealism, integrating painting and sculpture in a mix of great intensity.
"And think that I'm not a collector - Pietro said in an interview - I've always looked for works of art because I felt attracted, because I understood that they contained a meaning and a message not only for me, but also for the others, and I had to share it.”
The choice of a work represented for Pietro, as well as a profound joy, also the opportunity for new relationships, often destined to transform into lasting friendships capable of leaving a "trace" even in the fabric of the collection.
Artists such as Burri, Cascella, Guttuso, Maccari, Manzù, Marini, Mattioli, Morandi, Morlotti, Pomodoro, Vangi, are represented with a conspicuous number of works distributed over time and capable of summarizing their artistic parable.
Gifted with a happy predisposition for beauty, Pietro Barilla has built up an orderly narrative of art over the years, also helped by his friend and critic from Parma, Roberto Tassi (1921-1996), curator of the exhibition he wanted to organize at the Magnani Rocca Foundation in April 1993 on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.
Among the many works in the Collection are paintings by Chagall, De Chirico, Ernst, Picasso, Sutherland and sculptures by Moore, Rodin and other great masters of modern art.
How important art was in his life as an entrepreneur he himself declared in another interview:
“Art … is my horizon and my breath, it gives me warmth and makes me look forward. Art does not only tell the present, our needs, our practical needs. It is infinitely richer, it describes our soul in all its complexity, its torments, its doubts, its faith, its aspirations. It shows how we would like to live, what we would like to be. It reminds us of what we can become. Art is a path that we trace before us, a path of perfection, a teaching, a warning, a command, a call.
However, I have never only looked for the art object, I have also longed for a relationship with artists, who have always instilled in me the taste for creation and, at the same time, the need for perfection. And it may seem strange, but from them I also learned to look at the world with naive, amazed eyes, with astonishing simplicity. Especially by painters and sculptors. Through them you see things you didn't see and things that others don't see or where others haven't arrived yet. The work of art, then, does not represent us as we are, but as we would like to be, it does not answer today's questions, but those of the time to come"."