L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, JULY 23, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 18 L'Italo-Americano Y ou have almost certainly seen it, even if you have never set foot in t h e c o u n t r y : a sky of a blue that does not quite occur in nature and a sea below it to match; and then umbrella pines leaning in from one edge; a white- washed village climbing a hill; a young woman in local costume smiling out at you. Across the top, in tall confi- dent capitals, a single word: ITALIA. Down in a corner, small but insistent, four more letters: ENIT . This is the Italy of the travel poster, and for the better part of a centu- r y i t h a s b e e n d o i n g a remarkable job: teaching the rest of the world how to pic- ture an entire country. Those four letters stand for the Ente Nazionale Ital- iano per il Turismo, the I t a l i a n n a t i o n a l t o u r i s m board, founded in 1919 and one of the oldest organiza- tions of its kind anywhere. Its assignment was straightfor- ward and enormous: to per- suade foreigners to come and see Italy, and to spend their money doing it. Mind, the t r a v e l p o s t e r w a s n o t i t s invention, as railway compa- nies had been printing them since before the turn of the c e n t u r y , l u r i n g t r a v e l e r s toward the lakes and the Riv- iera long before ENIT exist- ed. But from the 1920s the new board took up the form with a national purpose and, working hand in hand with the State Railways, made it I t a l y ' s c a l l i n g c a r d t o t h e world for the next fifty years. Cheap to reproduce, easy to plaster in a railway station in Paris or London or New York, a good poster could sell a daydream to a stranger in the time it took to walk past it. Without a doubt, Italy had the artists to make those day- d r e a m s , e s p e c i a l l y i n t h e 1920s and 1930s, when the work went to some of the finest poster designers in Europe. M a r c e l l o D u d o v i c h brought a painterly elegance that slid, over the years, into the sl eek geometr y of Ar t Deco, while the Futurists, Fortunato Depero fore- most among them, pushed the other way, toward speed, bold blocks of color, and let- t e r s t h a t b e h a v e d l i k e machines. Designers such as M a r c e l l o N i z z o l i a n d Giuseppe Riccobaldi gave the posters their streamlined modern confidence, and even the great French master A. M. Cassandre lent his hand to Italy. The look changed with the decade, from the flowing Art Nouveau grace of those first railway posters to a h a r d e r , b r i g h t e r , m o r e architectural style: monu- ments rendered as if they had been built yesterday, express trains rushing diago- nally off the edge of the page, huge capital letters stacked like masonry. It was also, unavoidably, the era of the regime, which understood t h e v a l u e o f a f l a t t e r i n g n a t i o n a l i m a g e a n d w a s h a p p y t o s e e I t a l y s o l d a b r o a d a s b e a u t i f u l a n d orderly; the posters carried that polish, whatever else was true. Whoever drew them, the posters kept returning to the s a m e h a n d f u l o f i m a g e s , which became immediately recognizable: Rome meant the Colosseum and a broken c o l u m n a g a i n s t a g o l d e n light. Venice meant a gondo- la and the shimmer of the lagoon at dusk. The South meant Capri and the Amalfi coast, all cobalt water and terraced lemon groves; the North meant the Dolomites a n d t h e f a s h i o n a b l e s k i resorts, crisp snow under an alpine sun. There were the folk costumes, the village fes- tivals, the fishing nets and the parasols, and the sleeper trains that would carry you to all of it. And beneath every one of them ran the same silent promise, the one thing a northern European shiver- ing through February wanted most: sunshine, and a great deal of it. Piece those images togeth- er and you have the postcard that still sits in the back of nearly everyone's mind when they think of Italy, an image that didn't stop evolving, e v e n d u r i n g a n d s t r a i g h t after the war; if anything, it reached its brightest just as the country was changing fastest. Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, the boom y e a r s , a d e s i g n e r n a m e d Mario Puppo became the great popularizer of the Ital- ian tourist poster, turning o u t i m a g e a f t e r i m a g e i n luminous, cinematic color, with Filippo Romoli and others working the same rich seam. Their Italy was a Tech- nicolor paradise of beaches and bell towers and smiling locals in traditional dress. And here is the irony of the period: this was precisely the moment Italy was leaving that world behind, pouring off the land and into the fac- tories and the cities, trading the peasant past for scooters a n d r e f r i g e r a t o r s . T h e posters went on selling the old, sun-drenched Italy to foreigners even as Italians themselves were hurrying away from it. It was the age of La Dolce Vita and of mass tourism, and the picture on the wall hardened, in these years, into the one we have n e v e r q u i t e m a n a g e d t o replace. Right now, the story of how ENIT posters affected our perception of the country is all the more interesting to tell, because you can sudden- ly see it laid out: ENIT has spent recent years digitiz- i n g i t s o w n h i s t o r i c a l archive, a vast collection of posters, photographs, slides, and film reaching back to 1919, and putting a great deal of it online, where anyone can search it and where the board has mounted virtual exhibitions such as Promot- ing Beauty, staged for its centenary. Scroll through it and you are, in effect, watch- i n g a n a t i o n a l d a y d r e a m being assembled decade by d e c a d e , i m a g e b y i m a g e , artist by artist. You can trace the sky getting bluer, the let- tering getting bolder, the w o m a n i n c o s t u m e b e i n g joined and then replaced by the woman in a swimsuit. What is striking is how lit- t l e t h a t v i s i o n h a s a g e d because the travelers who step off the train at Naples or Venice today, cameras ready, are usually hunting for the very things those posters promised: the blue sea, the old ruins, the lemon terraces, the light. It is, still, the Italy t h a t a h a n d f u l o f g i f t e d artists first distilled onto paper a hundred years ago, and, a century on, it is the Italy we come expecting to find. You can check out ENIT d i g i t i z e d c o l l e c t i o n a t : https://www.enit.it/en/the- cultural-heritage-of-enit-spa GIULIA FRANCESCHINI How travel posters invented the Italy tourists still imagine Vintage travel posters promoted Italy through images of Rome, the Alps, fashionable resorts, and coastal destinations, helping shape the country's international image throughout the twentieth century (Composite image created using Adobe Illustrator AI; source images: Wikimedia Commons) LA VITA ITALIANA TRADIZIONI STORIA CULTURA

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