Four Cities, Four Masters: The ENIT Travel Posters That Reinvented the Italian Grand Tour

In 1919, the Italian government created the Ente Nazionale per le Industrie Turistiche — ENIT — with a single mission: to bring the world back to Italy after the devastation of the First World War. The tool they chose was the travel poster. Over the following decade, ENIT commissioned some of the finest graphic artists in Europe to create lithographic images of Italian cities that would hang in railway stations, shipping offices, and travel agencies from London to New York — images that distilled centuries of Italian civilization into a single composition, a single color, a single moment of arrested beauty.

The result was one of the most extraordinary bodies of travel poster art ever produced. This is the story of four of its greatest works — and the four cities they celebrated.

Napoli: Mario Borgoni and the Bay of Naples

Mario Borgoni (1869–1936) was one of the most prolific and celebrated Italian poster artists of the early 20th century. Born in Pesaro, he trained as a painter before turning to commercial graphics, and his work for ENIT and the shipping lines that served the Italian emigrant trade defined the visual language of Italian tourism for a generation.

His 1920 Napoli poster for ENIT is among his finest achievements. The composition is deceptively simple: the ochre towers of Castel Nuovo — the Aragonese fortress that has dominated the Naples waterfront since the 13th century — rise against a deep blue sky, with the Bay of Naples stretching behind them and Mount Vesuvius rising in the distance. The colors are bold and saturated, the shadows geometric, the whole composition organized with the clarity and confidence of a master of the lithographic medium.

The poster was printed by Richter & C., the Naples-based printing firm that was one of the finest chromolithographic workshops in Italy. Founded by a German immigrant in the 1840s, Richter had become the preferred printer of the Italian shipping lines and tourism agencies, and their technical mastery — the precise registration of colors, the smooth gradations of tone — gave Borgoni’s design a luminosity that reproduction can only approximate.

Castel Nuovo itself has a history as layered as the city it overlooks. Built by Charles I of Anjou in 1279, rebuilt by Alfonso V of Aragon in the 1440s, it has served as a royal palace, a military fortress, and a prison across seven centuries of Neapolitan history. The Triumphal Arch that pierces its walls — added by Alfonso to celebrate his conquest of Naples in 1443 — is one of the finest examples of early Renaissance sculpture in southern Italy. Borgoni reduced all of this to a silhouette, a color, a mood — and in doing so, captured something essential about Naples: its ability to compress history into a single, overwhelming image.

Venezia: The Modernist Lagoon

The ENIT Venice poster of around 1928 takes a very different approach from Borgoni’s Naples. Where Borgoni gives us the city from a distance — the landmark, the bay, the mountain — the Venice poster plunges us into the water itself. The composition is a close-up of gondola prows and colorful mooring poles, the distinctive ferro — the iron ornament that crowns the prow of every Venetian gondola — silhouetted against a sky of deep blue, with the dome of Santa Maria della Salute rising from the lagoon in the background.

The gondola ferro is one of the most recognizable symbols of Venice, and one of the most debated. Its distinctive shape — a curved blade with six forward-facing teeth and one rear-facing tooth — has been interpreted as representing the six sestieri of Venice, the Doge’s cap, the Grand Canal, and a dozen other things. What is certain is that it has been the standard ornament of the Venetian gondola since at least the 17th century, and that its silhouette is as immediately recognizable as the dome of the Salute or the campanile of San Marco.

Santa Maria della Salute — the great Baroque church that anchors the entrance to the Grand Canal — was built between 1631 and 1687 as a votive offering to the Virgin Mary for the city’s deliverance from the plague that had killed a third of Venice’s population. Its architect, Baldassare Longhena, designed a building of extraordinary originality: a central octagonal plan crowned by a massive dome, surrounded by a ring of volutes that anchor it to the water’s edge. The result is a building that seems to float — as Venice itself seems to float — between water and sky.

Roma: Géo Dorival and the Forum at Dawn

Géo Dorival (1879–1968) was a French poster artist who specialized in travel and tourism graphics for the great railway companies of the early 20th century. His 1913 poster for the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway — promoting the Rome service through the Mont-Cenis tunnel — is one of the masterpieces of the Grand Tour poster tradition.

The composition shows the Roman Forum at dawn: the columns of the Temple of Saturn in the foreground, bathed in intense orange light, with the Arch of Septimius Severus and the Palatine Hill rising behind them. The sky is a deep blue-violet, the shadows long and dramatic, the whole scene suffused with the particular quality of Roman morning light — warm, golden, slightly unreal — that has captivated travelers since the days of Goethe and Byron.

The Roman Forum was the center of public life in ancient Rome for nearly a thousand years — the site of temples, basilicas, triumphal arches, and the rostra from which orators addressed the Roman people. By the time Dorival painted it, it had been an archaeological site for three centuries, its monuments half-buried under centuries of accumulated debris, its columns standing in isolation against the sky. This condition of beautiful ruin — the ancient world visible but incomplete, present but irretrievable — was precisely what the Grand Tour tradition had always celebrated, and Dorival captured it with the economy and precision of a great poster artist.

The Temple of Saturn — whose eight surviving columns anchor Dorival’s composition — is one of the oldest monuments in the Forum, dedicated in 498 BC and rebuilt several times over the following centuries. It served as the treasury of the Roman state, and its podium was used as a platform for public announcements. The columns that survive are from the last rebuilding, in the 4th century AD — a late Roman patchwork of different marbles and capitals that gives the temple its slightly improvised, deeply human quality.

Milano: Alessandro Pomi and the Duomo from Above

Alessandro Pomi (1877–1958) was a Milanese painter and illustrator whose work for ENIT and the Italian railways brought an impressionist warmth to the travel poster tradition. His 1920 Milano lithograph is one of the most unusual travel posters of the golden age: instead of showing the Duomo from the piazza below — the conventional view, the tourist’s view — Pomi places the viewer on the cathedral’s own terraces, looking out over a forest of Gothic marble spires and pinnacles toward the city beyond.

The Duomo di Milano is one of the largest Gothic cathedrals in the world, and one of the longest in construction: begun in 1386 under Gian Galeazzo Visconti, it was not completed until 1965, when the last of its bronze doors was installed. The result of nearly six centuries of continuous construction is a building of extraordinary complexity — 135 spires, 3,400 statues, 96 gargoyles, and a forest of pinnacles that gives the roofline its distinctive, almost organic quality.

Pomi’s decision to show the Duomo from above — from the perspective of someone who has climbed to the terraces and is looking out over the spires — was a stroke of genius. It transforms the cathedral from an object to be looked at into a landscape to be inhabited, a world of marble and sky that the viewer enters rather than observes. The aerial perspective, the impressionist handling of light, the early Art Déco color palette — warm ochres and cool blues, the marble white of the spires against the haze of the Lombard plain — give the poster a quality that is simultaneously documentary and dreamlike.

Our Italy Grand Tour Puzzle brings together all four cities in a single collection — choose Naples, Venice, Rome, or Milan, and let Italy come together piece by piece in your hands.

References

• Arrasich, Massimo. I manifesti del turismo italiano / Italian Tourism Posters. Edizioni Gribaudo, 2007.
• Bartoli, Roberta & Marzio Stocchi. ENIT: 100 anni di turismo italiano. Gangemi Editore, 2019.
• Weill, Alain. The Poster: A Worldwide Survey and History. G.K. Hall, 1985.
• Hillier, Bevis. Posters. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.