Can Achille Lauro and Raffaella Carrà really promote Italy’s museums?

Do you remember Botticelli’s Venus eating a margherita pizza and taking selfies? In 2023 the tourism campaign “Open to Meraviglia,” promoted by then–tourism minister Daniela Santanchè, turned Italian cultural communication into a minor national case study: memes, political controversy and endless debates about the use of art to promote the country. Since then, every new institutional initiative dedicated to Italy’s cultural heritage seems to move across slippery ground. The same happened with “Felicità” (Happiness), the new campaign launched by the Ministry of Culture to promote the Musei Italiani app, the platform developed as part of the PNRR Accessibility program that brings together information and services for hundreds of museums and cultural institutions across the country.

The intention is clear: to use a pop language to bring heritage closer to a broader audience. In Italy, however, this remains a divisive experiment. Here art is still treated as something serious—almost sacred—and turning it into pop language requires a rare balance. The new campaign has reopened a question worth asking: can Italian museums speak the language of pop without losing their authority?

The full film runs for twenty minutes, while the online snapshots range from thirty seconds to two minutes. Set to the notes of Felicità ta ta by Raffaella Carrà, nearly forty Italian cultural sites—archaeological parks, museums and historic monuments—appear on screen, inhabited by six hundred talents: athletes, singers, dancers, actors and visitors. Among the best-known faces are Achille Lauro at Castel Sant’Angelo, Alba Rohrwacher at the Galleria Borghese and Olympic and Paralympic athletes such as Ambra Sabatini.

Luca Finotti

Colors are saturated and the atmosphere evokes an Italian summer. Paintings by great masters and graphic interventions by new generations of creatives seem to emerge directly from the screens of mobile phones. The editing is fast and layered. The film is directed by Luca Finotti—whom Forbes described as “the director behind fashion’s viral videos”—together with art director Paola Manfrin, a long-time collaborator of artist Maurizio Cattelan.

The video also features unknown faces. Two elderly museum directors from Ancona dance to the song through which they first met. A friend of the director—identical to the protagonist of a Caravaggio painting—is called in the middle of the night to take part in the shoot. The project, filmed over the course of a year, involved twenty cinematographers—one for each Italian region—and twenty-five graphic studios distributed across the country.

“The layering of images, faces and places—edited at dizzying speeds—creates a sense of disorientation that sometimes makes the institutional message difficult to read, as well as the cultural depth of the sites and artworks,” wrote Exibart, referring to the video’s fast pace and the presence of celebrities who risk distracting from the cultural content. According to Finestre sull’Arte, the use of pop testimonials such as Achille Lauro also risks becoming a communicative shortcut, shifting attention from heritage to the celebrity cameo—much as happened in 2020 when Chiara Ferragni visited the Uffizi. The criticism has not reached the intensity of the backlash that hit “Open to Meraviglia,” but it has once again landed on the desk of the Ministry of Culture.

Some observers argue that the campaign resembles a tourism marketing operation more than a cultural campaign. Even the slogan has been debated: happiness, several museologists noted in online discussions, is a powerful emotional promise but also a very generic one. The concern among some commentators is that emotion may end up replacing cultural mediation, turning the museum into a space of entertainment rather than knowledge. And yet outside Italy examples of collisions between pop culture and museum culture are everywhere: the Louvre has worked with Snapchat on augmented-reality projects and in 2018 allowed its galleries to host the video Apeshit by Beyoncé and Jay-Z, while MoMA in 2015 devoted an exhibition to singer Björk.

Much of the criticism has also focused on the campaign’s visual language. Luca Finotti comes from the world of fashion films rather than cinema or art. Born in Pavia in 1986, he studied between Bocconi University and the New York Film Academy before building an international career in communication. In recent years he has directed campaigns for brands such as Nike, Versace and Dolce & Gabbana, working with some of the most recognizable figures in contemporary pop culture.

His style is immediately recognizable: rapid editing, layered imagery and a strong musical component. For some observers it is precisely this aesthetic—typical of fashion communication—that clashes with the idea of the Italian museum. But this is where the question arises: why, among all cultural products, should museum heritage be the one that remains impermeable to a pop aesthetic?

For Finotti, however, the directorial choices are not primarily about aesthetics. The heart of the video is emotion. “I started from the gaze of a child,” he tells Domus. “I thought about the museums we visited on school trips, about the grandeur of art when you encounter it as a child. With the camera I tried to return precisely that gaze.”

The campaign’s target audience, he explains, is not insiders: “I assumed they would go to museums anyway. The target had to be someone else.” For Paola Manfrin, who accompanied Finotti in the project’s artistic direction, “Felicità” was first and foremost “an extremely creative social campaign.”

“I followed the advice of screenwriter Ivan Cotroneo: call your friends—or make new ones. And it worked,” Finotti recalls. Finotti and Manfrin remember children shooting sequences themselves, costumes and sets chosen together with the protagonists, and talents who self-directed on set. “They stood behind the camera like Ester,” the director says, referring to the child who in the video films Botticelli’s Primavera.

Luca Finotti

The project will also continue with a series of short videos in which participants recount the museums they inhabited during the shoot.

The campaign’s soundtrack also speaks about the democratization of culture: Felicità ta ta, written by Gianni Boncompagni for Raffaella Carrà. The song dates back to 1988, at the height of Carrà’s television career. It is not a Sanremo hit but a piece designed for the variety show format: that popular form built on rhythm, choreography and participation. “To make something truly pop requires an incredible amount of work,” Finotti says. “Carrà’s shows are proof of that.” The same logic seems to guide the “Felicità” campaign.

“Over the course of a day—over the course of a life—we never see all those colors. Sometimes we don’t even know where they are. Artists have managed to capture them forever in time. That’s what makes art something extraordinary.” In the end the question remains open: do Italian museums fail to speak the language of pop because they cannot—or because they have never really been allowed to?

Finotti and Manfrin seem very clear about whom they want to address. “I’m a kid from the provinces too,” Finotti concludes. “I made this campaign for people like me. For me it will have succeeded when a personal trainer from Viterbo gets in the car on the weekend and decides to go to a museum.”

All images: Courtesy Ministry of Culture - General Directorate Museums