Guido Barilla has made a humble apology on the Barilla website following his comments about only featuring traditional families in his advertising. His comments went viral and there followed calls internationally for a boycott of Barilla pasta, sauces and other culinary products. Mister Barilla then exacerbated the situation by saying that if they didn’t like his comments gays could buy their pasta from another company.
When it looked as if ‘gays’ were going to do precisely that, however, the company’s owner made this profound, heartfelt apology, in English, which can be seen on the Barilla website. This raises the question of whether he made the apology in Italian too, or whether he is sending out different messages to the international community and to the residents of the more traditionalist Italian family.