Battista Farina never built a building, and his name still ended up on one of the great honours of Italian architecture. The man Turin called Pinin drew cars — the Cisitalia in the Museum of Modern Art, two decades of Ferraris — and in doing so drew a piece of Italy’s cultural heritage that now lives in museums. Our archive series has so far followed architects, sculptors and writers; with Pininfarina it opens a different wing — design, and the company museums that keep it. This is his life, and where to find it.
The smallest of the family
Giovanni Battista Farina was born in Turin on 2 November 1893, to Giuseppe and Giacinta Vigna, the tenth of eleven children. The Piedmontese nickname that became a global brand — Pinin, the little one — marked his place in the family. His schooling was the workshop: at twelve he was apprenticed to his older brother Giovanni’s coachbuilding firm, the Stabilimenti Farina, and in 1920 he travelled to the United States to see how the American automakers worked. He came home convinced the car body was an industrial product that could also be a work of art.
Corso Trapani, 1930
On 22 May 1930, before the Turin notary Annibale Germano and with a capital of one million lire, the S.A. Carrozzeria Pinin Farina was founded, with its works on Corso Trapani. The Lancia Dilambda of 1931 was among its first designs, and through the 1930s the shop — soon turning out seven or eight bodies a day — clothed chassis for Alfa Romeo, Hispano-Suiza, Fiat, Rolls-Royce and Cadillac. The house style was already recognisable: clean volumes, speed drawn at a standstill.
The Cisitalia
The peak came just after the war. The Cisitalia 202 berlinetta of 1947 compressed everything Pinin Farina had learned into one small, smooth, astonishing coupé — and in 1951 the Museum of Modern Art in New York chose it as one of the eight cars in its landmark exhibition 8 Automobiles. In 1972 it became the first automobile ever to enter MoMA’s permanent collection, where it remains: an Italian car body in a museum of art, which is precisely where its designer thought the discipline belonged.
Ferrari and the factory
He had first crossed paths with Enzo Ferrari at the race tracks of the 1920s. In 1951 the acquaintance became a collaboration that made the two names nearly inseparable; for the following decades, most road-going Ferraris would wear Pinin Farina lines. In 1952 his work also debuted in America, on the Nash-Healey — the reach was transatlantic from the start. The company grew with the partnership: in 1958 a larger plant opened at Grugliasco, outside Turin. From the early 1950s Battista had brought his son Sergio and his son-in-law Renzo Carli into the leadership, and in 1961 he handed them the direction of the firm.
Pininfarina, by decree
The nickname became law on 6 June 1961, when the president of the Republic, Giovanni Gronchi, decreed the change of the family surname from Farina to Pininfarina — a rare case of a brand absorbing the man who made it. In 1963 the Politecnico di Torino gave him an honorary degree in architecture. His last design was presented about a month before the end: the Alfa Romeo 1600 Duetto. Battista Pininfarina died in Lausanne on 3 April 1966. The honours kept arriving long after — in 2004 the Automotive Hall of Fame inducted him, his son Sergio accepting on the family’s behalf.
He belongs in a heritage archive for the same reason the Cisitalia belongs in MoMA. Car design is the twentieth century’s Italian craft tradition at industrial scale, and its monuments are collected in museums — the company’s own collection at Cambiano, the national automobile museum in Turin, the halls at Arese and Maranello where his lines still hold the room. Italy has a name for these places — musei d’impresa, company museums — and they belong on the country’s heritage map as surely as its palaces and churches: collections where industry keeps its art, and where a boy nicknamed “the little one” turned out to be its largest figure.
In the archive
Follow Battista Pininfarina across Cultural Heritage Online — the museums that keep his work and the anniversaries we mark:
- Museo Pininfarina, Cambiano — the design centre and collection of the company he founded.
- MAUTO, Turin — the national automobile museum in his home city.
- Museo Storico Alfa Romeo, Arese — the marque of his first great clients and of his last design, the Duetto.
- Museo Ferrari, Maranello — the partnership that defined both houses, from 1951.
- 2 November 1893 — the birth of Battista “Pinin” Farina, in the CHO anniversary calendar.
- 3 April 1966 — the death of Battista Pininfarina.