The Italian ministry of Cultural Affairs has just launched a new ad campaign intended to shock visitors and residents into paying homage (and admission) to some of the country’s most important cultural sites.
In one example, shown above, four cranes work at disassembling the Colosseum by night, while in another example, below, helicopters carry Michelangelo’s David into the stratosphere. Taglines on the ads read, “If you don’t visit it, we’ll take it away.”
The images are super clever and thought provoking, but we find the ads just a bit too threatening in that they suggest that if we don’t pony up our 12 euro (that’s $18.00) to visit the Colosseum, they’re going to disassemble it. It hardly seems the best strategy for a period in which tourism is on the decline thanks to the worldwide economic crisis.
The ministry of cultural affairs says that they’re trying to provoke Italians into making visits to museums and archaeological sites important to the country’s cultural patrimony. To this end, the ads will be aired on TV, radio, and internet and will appear in train stations and airports as well.
There’s a third version of this ad of which we could find no representations on the web. Apparently it shows four workers disassembling Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper in Milan.
isn’t that just standard mafia talk? “hey, pay this protection money… wouldn’t want to see anything bad happen to the David… what, you refuse? BAM we’re taking out a kneecap!”