Ice cream ads are the soul of Italian summers A dive into iconic catchphrase and colors
"There's a soft heart for us / and a sweet ice-cream cone", sings the jingle of an advertisement of the famous Cornetto Algida from 1978 entitled Il sole intorno a noi. Rewatching this video today represents a dive into nostalgia and it's surprising how over forty years that language has been updated but without really changing: there is summer, there are friends, love, the sea, swimming pools, the sun, leisure, children playing.
The imagery of the Italian summer, that of the girls in sundresses riding on bikes, that of the young couples lying on the beach, of the chalets and the promenade, of the summer, hit songs is all here – a mood board ante-litteram for that bright and light world that has managed to infiltrate even beyond the beaches, to arrive, in the form of illustrated tin signs, at the door of many Italian bars, colonizing not only our cities but also our collective imagination: anyone in Italy knows directly or indirectly the phrase of Stefano Accorsi who hits on with two American girls at the bar «Du gust is megl che uan» or Mecna's song for the Sammontana ad, as cringe as it is unforgettable, «Summer is when things happen».
Colour coding the summer
Over time there has been a strange process: the summer feeling evoked by those advertisements, among the most iconic of Italian pop culture, has been synthesized in an increasingly precise and at the same time abstract visual language in which colour becomes the signifier of an entire image. The idea of the sea, for example, has turned into a bright blue colourway that has a deep but not dark hue and that is defined, in English, Capri or Deep Sky Blue and is said to have been from the Blue Grotto of the eponymous island. Interestingly enough, the 50-year-old Motta Ice Cream ad uses the same shade of blue that is used today.
As an aspirational, the Mediterranean aesthetic changes with the change of society and its desires: the jet-set of aristocrats that Slim Arons photographed in Capri in the 1960s has now disappeared along with all its codes, replaced by a society that possesses its own aspirations and its own ways of realizing them. As purely sensory, however, the visual language of ice creams always remains the same: the advertising of the Cornetto Algida of '78 today touches the same keys that touched yesterday and in fact, from the 80s to the hour, that language has stabilized and remains almost unchanged – which is also why ice cream advertisements, both on video and in the form of catalogue signs at the entrance to bars, remain a fixed presence in our pop culture.
