Philip Michael Rolla was born in 1938 in Madrone, a very small agricultural town in the farm country outside of San Francisco. His entire family, of Italian origin–his grandparents immigrated to California from Italy’s Piedmont area in the years 1910-1916–was made up of farmers. Thanks to his father’s commitment to allow his children1 to study, he graduated from Santa Clara University with a degree in engineering and economics. Although his work was in engineering, his economic studies would take on an important role, above all in the creation of his future company. Phil Rolla–as he prefers to be called–has nurtured a passion for racing boats and cars, and has been fascinated by their technical and aesthetic aspects, since he was a boy. After having worked–in order to complete his studies–for a company that carried out resistance tests on materials, he understood that his destiny did not include working for a large American company, and he decided to move to Europe.

At the end of 1962 he went to Norway and then to Turin. In Turin he could count on the help of two of his father’s cousins, but his decision to stay there was also due to the presence of the Hungarian automobile manufacturer Frank Reisner. Phil, who worked for Reisner as an apprentice until 1965, considers the experience fundamental both professionally and personally. Following Reisner’s advice, and for personal reasons, he moved to Canton Ticino in 1966 with Renate Michel–a ceramicist, and his partner since 1963. The region’s three large lakes and the presence of Como boat builder Angelo Molinari–whose friendship and instruction were fundamental–rendered it the perfect place to further develop his interest in marine propulsion.

Phil Rolla rented a garage and began contacting people in the United States who might be interested in his ideas about production of competition propellers. He received a response from Bill Harrah, an ardent follower of motorboat racing and the official importer for Ferrari in the United States, with a cheque for $1,600 to build three innovative propellers–one of which turned out to be very important for future discoveries in hydrodynamics. Thus the company Record was born, which in turn became Rolla SP Propellers. From this moment on Phil Rolla’s ascent was assured due to his talent and passion for his work, to his successes in racing motorboats, combined with his interest in contemporary art.

His propellers are objects of remarkable beauty and Rolla has stated that if he hadn’t been familiar with conceptualism and minimalism, mostly in the works of Donald Judd, Walter de Maria and Dan Flavin, he never would have had certain intuitions that were realised in his commitment to functional aesthetics, and that would be decisive in industrial research.

In Canton Ticino he was friended by architects and artists–among them Dolf Schnebli, Pierino Selmoni, and Flavio Paolucci–and many others–thanks to whom he began collecting and expanding upon his knowledge about international contemporary art. Finally, at the end of the 1990’s he made his first important acquisition when, with his second wife Rosella Zanardini, an art lover, they purchased a work by Rauschenberg2, just when the Guggenheim Museum was dedicating an important retrospective3 to the artist. In the same period, a close friend, Como architect Paolo Brambilla, showed them a deconsecrated church in Como that was in very bad condition.

1 Phil has a brother, Richard, who like him would not follow in the family’s tradition of farming.
2 Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, Solvent tranfer and oil with collage of fabric, silk photos,
   and 3 plastic rulers, on 2 overlapping sheets of paper, 1980, purchased by Dranoff Fine Art.
3 Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 19 September 1997 - 7
   January 1998.
4 www.bv33.org