The calendars: the quality of communication

Among the promotional materials utilized by Barilla, calendars and postcards are of particular interest from the standpoint of communication. In line with the customs of those times, the postcards reproduced both promotional announcements printed in a larger size format (billboards, calendars, posters), and photographs of the factory and the workers.

The calendars are a remarkable legacy of the culture of the times and contained advertising information even from the early years of the century: the one dedicated to “tortellini” in 1914, as well as the one of 1935 twenty years later, depict scenes with people eating the products (an infrequent event in those times), and a few packaged products appear in them, prefiguring future times.

The high quality level of this achievement must be acknowledged: these were undersigned by famous artists such as Emma Bonazzi, the mischievous Adolfo Busi, the Disney style illustrator Luciano Bonacini, the independent thinker Mario Puppo, who in 1938 introduced Fosfina pasta among the packaged products, a food enriched with nutritional elements, very modern as a concept, and Erberto Carboni, a precursor of new times with the revolutionary collage-calendar of 1939. The printing was done by avant-garde lithographic printing works: Zafferri of Parma, at the time among the most important ones in Italy, the renowned Chappuis company of Bologna, the Grafiche Ricordi of Milan which are still famous today, Gros-Monti of Turin, and Amilcare Pizzi of Milan.

The quest for a refined quality of the image was surely not a casual accident, rather, a determining element to communicate to the public the concept of the attentive and constant care placed in the quality of one own’s product, the pasta, back than as it is today.