Giuseppe Pedriali was born in Cannuzzo di Cervia on May 24, 1867 and moved to Forlì with his family when he was four years old. In 1889 he graduated in mechanical engineering in Turin under the supervision of professor Galileo Ferraris and in 1890 he moved to Belgium to further his studies at the Montefiori Institute in Liège. In those same years he met the woman who would become his lifelong companion: Virginia Dutilleul.
After a short stay first in Rome and then in Charleroi (Belgium), where his strong skills allowed him to quickly climb to the direction of the Société Tramways Bruxellois, he went to Paris where he was entrusted with the investigation of the railway disaster of Les Couronnes. In 1907 he was called to Buenos Aires by the Compañía de Tramways Anglo Argentina and it is on this occasion that Pedriali would be able to earn a first class place in the international engineering scene by designing the first metro in South America: the Line A of Buenos Aires. As a manager of the company he also took care of the problems of his workers by establishing a Mutual Society. In 1926 he returned to Italy, dividing his time between his villa at Antella in Florence, Forlì and Villa Virginia in Sanremo, where the paintings in this collection were located. After a life full of burdens and honors in 1932 Pedriali died in his villa in Antella, leaving all his heritage to the Province of Forlì, to which he remained forever bound.
Pedriali was a patron and a benefactor: he donated works of art, but also agricultural estates, model farms, he built nurseries, seaside colonies for poor and sick children, he offered, thanks to the Giuseppe Pedriali Foundation, six scholarships for young brave but poor students every year. Since 1967 the Provincial Administration of Forlì-Cesena has been promoting a National Competition called "Ingegner Giuseppe Pedriali", every two years and now at its 24th edition, addressed to university students, undergraduates, graduates, PhD students, researchers, companies and scholars who have proved to contribute to the progress of sciences in the fields of physics, chemistry and electricity applied to the improvement of the Italian industrial production.