Barbareschi was born in Montevideo, Uruguay to Italian parents Francesco Saverio, an engineer and former World War II partisan from Milan, and Maria Antonietta Hirsch, an economist of Ashkenazi Jewish descent.

Barbareschi studied acting with Alessandro Fersen, and began his professional career in 1970 as an assistant director to Virginio Puecher at the Teatro di Verona.

He was one of four actors whom the Italian police believed had been murdered in the making of the 1980 horror film Cannibal Holocaust, where he also abused and killed a young piglet.

The actors had signed contracts to stay out of the media for a year in order to fuel rumors that the film was a snuff movie.

[2][3] In 2008, he was elected as a Member of the Italian Parliament in the Chamber of Deputies with Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right party, The People of Freedom.

[5][6][7][8] Barbareschi has defended director Roman Polanski, with whom he has worked several times as a producer, against his sexual abuse conviction, claiming the case against him is due to "political correctness.