Posters: Advertising and Italian Fashion, 1890-1950

Mountains, hills, parks, rivers, lakes, seashores, art cities with an ancient past, thermal spas, Renaissance villas, intriguing archeological ruins and a solid tradition of hospitality have made Italy, since the late nineteenth century, a favored destination of a nascent national and international exclusive, cultured class of tourism.
To make Italians themselves as well as the foreign market aware of the many attractions of the Beautiful Country, the message was entrusted to the publicity tools par excellence of that time: posters, flyers, brochures, picture magazines.
Their force of communication and capillary penetration was the vehicle for luminous, charming, and always very elegant images, in both choice of color and formal solutions, which were often commissioned from the leading illustrators of the period, from Duilio Cambellotti to Leonetto Cappiello, from Marcello Dudovich to Franz Lenhart, from Gino Boccasile to Mario Puppo.
Travel, one of the most accessible and alluring "dreams" of the twentieth-century public, thus became -for many if not for all- a social necessity and a finally affordable interval of beauty, loisirs, quiet, civilization, and culture.
The catalogue is divided into seven thematic chapters and is preceded by a historical essay and completed by a bibliography.