The daughter of a cabinetmaker and restaurateur, Barbara Calzolari was born in Bologna in 1963. She graduated at ENALC, a school of commercial art, in Bologna. She worked for Publiflash (the silkscreening laboratory of the painter Otello Brocca) and completed projects for Bologna’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna, where she met and came to know artists such as Aligi Sassu, Virgilio Guidi, and Ugo Nespolo. Other encounters would later come to change the direction of her professional life, among them her meeting with Massimo Osti, founder of Stone Island and C.P. Company, who offered her the chance to work in the fashion sector. She began to work with large firms in the garment and licensing trade creating projects and developing in Far East for more than 15 years and to collaborate on designing collections and developing products for Pirelli, Ferrari, and Ferrero.
Meanwhile, over a period of years, she cultivated and pursued her greatest passion: calligraphy with Associazione Calligrafica Italiana, in the United States, she studied in greater depth the use of the flexible nib for Spencerian script with Michael Sull. In 2008, Barbara Calzolari applied her skills to the creation of the masterpiece in only four pieces of the” Deus Caritas Est”, a complete work of art in book form. She engrossed as a souvenir of the Italy of beauty the national anthems that the prime minister of Italy wished to present to the heads of state assembled at the G8 Summit in 2009 were she was demonstrating inside the Excellency Italian Museum. She has writing three manuscript prestigious books on Catherine de’ Medici epistolar corrispondence now held in the Washington DC Library, and in the Vittoriano Museum in Rome. She attends International Calligraphy conventions, Iampeth, Georgia Emory University College of Arts Atlanta, Calligraphy Centre in North Carolina, Friends of the Alphabeth and Pennablers in Atlanta,ECV school of visual communication in Bordeaux, in march she will teach Spencerian in berlin for the « Skilled Hands » Association and in July she will be part of the teaching group with a long week workshop for » Legacy Calligraphy Convention ».
In February 2014, she gave a workshop in Bordeaux to help the students improve their calligraphy skills, and create headlines with a brush.