{"id":22855,"date":"2023-04-28T13:30:34","date_gmt":"2023-04-28T13:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/official-promo-video-for\/"},"modified":"2023-04-28T13:34:18","modified_gmt":"2023-04-28T13:34:18","slug":"official-promo-video-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/official-promo-video-for\/","title":{"rendered":"Official promo video for Italy tourism features Slovenia"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This April 23 story has been corrected to change the name of the region to Kras, not Cotar, in paragraph 7)<\/p>\n

ROME (Reuters) – Italy’s tourism ministry has faced ridicule after an official video to attract tourists to Italy used footage of people in Slovenia drinking Slovenian wine.<\/p>\n

The video, part of a 9-million euro ($9.91 million) campaign produced by the Armando Testa communications group, was widely mocked by critics and on social media even before it emerged that part of it had been shot abroad.<\/p>\n

Titled “Open to Meraviglia” (Open to Wonder), it uses a computerised “influencer” version of Venus, a symbol of Italian art, as depicted by Sandro Botticelli in his renaissance masterpiece The Birth of Venus.<\/p>\n

The very modern “Venus”, dons a mini-skirt and is shown eating pizza and presenting some of Italy’s main tourist attractions such Rome’s Coliseum or Florence’s cathedral.<\/p>\n

Art historian Tomaso Montanari called the advertising campaign “grotesque”, and an “obscene” waste of money, while the video was lampooned by users of Italian social media platforms.<\/p>\n

The most controversial footage shows a group of young people smiling on a sunlit patio drinking wine in what is presented as a typical Italian scene.<\/p>\n

However, eagle-eyed viewers spotted that the patio in question is actually in the Kras region of Slovenia, close to the Italian border, and the bottle on the table has a Cotar wine label.<\/p>\n

The Armando Testa communications group was not immediately available to comment.<\/p>\n

Italian Tourism Minister Daniela Santanche, a member of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party, called critics of the video “snobs” and said the depiction of Venus as an influencer was aimed at attracting young people. <\/p>\n

($1 = 0.9079 euros)<\/p>\n

\n

(Reporting by Gavin Jones, Editing by Alexandra Hudson)<\/p>\n

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(This April 23 story has been corrected to change the name of the region to Kras, not Cotar, in paragraph 7) ROME (Reuters) – Italy’s tourism ministry has faced ridicule after an official video to attract tourists to Italy used footage of people in Slovenia drinking Slovenian wine. The video, part of a 9-million euro […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":22856,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1222],"tags":[1223],"class_list":["post-22855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-u-s-world-news","tag-updated"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-content\/uploads\/Reuters_Direct_Media\/USOnlineReportWorldNews\/tagreuters.com2023binary_LYNXMPEJ3O0II-VIEWIMAGE.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22855"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27881,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22855\/revisions\/27881"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}