We’re surrounded by it. In magazines, on the radio, on TV, on city walls, along motorway billboards, on our phones, inside apps, across websites, whispering into our headphones. Advertising is everywhere and it controls our lives. It’s often described as the soul of commerce: a technique that makes us desire things we don’t need, a kind of spell that convinces us to buy products we already own, a divertissement that hides far more than it seems to reveal.
Long loved and just as long resented, advertising in Italy quickly became more than a commercial tool. From the very beginning, it took on the qualities of a genuine artistic expression. A playground for human creativity where—if we’re allowed a cliché—Italians do it better. Campaigns, images and authors that have, over time, become cultural icons in their own right.
