Promoting Italy in the Twentieth Century: A Diachronic Analysis of Visuals in ENIT Tourism Brochures for English-Speaking Tourists

Previous research relating to the DIETALY (Destination Italy in Tourism Translation Over the Years) project has shown that between the 1920s and the 1950s the Italian National Tourist Board (ENIT) promoted Italy’s image abroad through a wide range of tourist materials in English, such as magazines, brochures, radio broadcasts, booklets. The published literature produced within this project (Agorni & Parini 2025) has investigated “the interplay between language, translation and tourism promotion in shaping Italy’s international image” (Agorni 2025a: 22). The aim of this paper is to analyse the visuals used in ENIT tourist materials in English in order to investigate how Italy’s image was promoted for English-speaking international tourists and to track its evolution over the years. The analysis focuses on a sample of fourteen brochures in English published between 1920 and 1963, which were selected from the DIETALY database. In terms of content, the selected brochures cover the whole Italian territory, promoting cultural, historical, natural, artistic, and urban features of Italy. Quantitative and qualitative data relating to the visuals are presented. These include the number of pictures contained in each brochure as well as their classification into nine categories according to the represented subject(s). Drawing on the Grammar of Visual Design (Kress and van Leeuwen 2021), multimodal analysis was carried out on a selection of pictures in order to understand the role of visual communication in shaping perceptions of Italy. Finally, by comparing quantitative and qualitative data across the different time periods, we attempt to shed light on the evolution of the promoted image of Italy, focusing on shifts in the prominence of certain subjects over others. The results are framed within a discussion of how institutions adapted to socio-cultural shifts to meet the expectations of foreign tourists, and how they exploited visual communication to promote international tourism in Italy.