ROME, April 25 (Reuters) – Italy’s tourism ministry has confronted ridicule after an official video to draw vacationers to Italy used footage of individuals in Slovenia ingesting Slovenian wine.
The video, a part of a 9-million euro ($9.91 million) marketing campaign produced by the Armando Testa communications group, was extensively mocked by critics and on social media even earlier than it emerged that a part of it had been shot overseas.
Titled “Open to Meraviglia” (Open to Surprise), it makes use of a computerised “influencer” model of Venus, an emblem of Italian artwork, as depicted by Sandro Botticelli in his renaissance masterpiece The Start of Venus.
The very fashionable “Venus”, dons a mini-skirt and is proven consuming pizza and presenting a few of Italy’s primary vacationer points of interest such Rome’s Coliseum or Florence’s cathedral.
Artwork historian Tomaso Montanari referred to as the promoting marketing campaign “grotesque”, and an “obscene” waste of cash, whereas the video was lampooned by customers of Italian social media platforms.
Probably the most controversial footage exhibits a bunch of younger folks smiling on a sunlit patio ingesting wine in what’s offered as a typical Italian scene.
Nevertheless, eagle-eyed viewers noticed that the patio in query is definitely within the Cotar area of Slovenia, near the Italian border, and the bottle on the desk has a Cotar wine label.
The Armando Testa communications group was not instantly accessible to remark.
Italian Tourism Minister Daniela Santanche, a member of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy get together, referred to as critics of the video “snobs” and mentioned the depiction of Venus as an influencer was geared toward attracting younger folks.
($1 = 0.9079 euros)
Reporting by Gavin Jones, Enhancing by Alexandra Hudson
: .
