Roberto Villata was born in Turin in 1954 and began trombone lessons as a child, which he continued for three years at the Turin Conservatory under Maestro Arfinengo. He then devoted himself to technical studies.
In 1974, he founded the music publishing house of the same name with his musician friend Gioachino Scomegna. The two young publishers initially focussed on publishing educational texts for the conservatoire, but soon turned their attention to music for wind band, which had not yet experienced the same musical development in Italy as in the rest of Europe.
Villata has managed the publishing house alone since 1978. The distribution for the most important foreign publishers is supplemented by the production of numerous works by young, promising Italian composers, so that Scomegna became the most important publisher of wind music in Italy in just a few years: The catalogue includes over 1,000 titles. Since the 1990s, he has also enjoyed remarkable success abroad.
In addition to his main activity as a publisher, Roberto Villata also occasionally composes music himself; in recent years he has also resumed active playing in the brass band, now with the tuba.