Costruire un mito: marche, prodotti e la rappresentazione dell'italianità nel mondo

Texts promoting brands and products are forever present in our use of mass media and they contribute to fuelling a common vision that, over and over again, suggests defined models related to “work”, “family”, “children”, “men”, “women”, etc. In some cases they even take part in the symbolic creation of the identity and image of a whole country. If we take a moment to observe Italian brands and products communicating on international markets, we may notice that Italy’s own image and culture is also often conveyed: a well-defined and continuously repeated symbolic and value-driven profile. Indeed, if it is possible to speak of a vision of ‘Italianess’ in international commercial advertising, it would be in terms of the systematic repetition of texts that continue to convey the same topics, symbols and values, by adapting and modernising them within different stories/representations and rhetorics. Using Roland Barthes and Jean-Marie Floch’s conceptual battery theory, this paper will seek to offer an initial definition of this vision of ‘Italianess’.