Casa Italia Londra — Brand Identity

Italian Embassy London x Istituto Marangoni, 2024–25

When the Italian Embassy in London commissioned Istituto Marangoni to design the visual identity for Italy House — its new state-of-the-art headquarters directly opposite Buckingham Palace — the brief was deceptively simple: feel distinctly Italian, avoid clichés, and work everywhere from a diplomatic letterhead to a building-scale mosaic. The Ambassador's own instruction to students was blunter: don't be shy.

The submission was shortlisted in the top 3 from the full Marangoni cohort and presented directly to the Italian Embassy team for final review.

The mark is a triple-arch logomark, a large Roman arch containing two smaller arches, abstracting three distinct moments of Italian architectural heritage: the triumphal permanence of the Arch of Titus, the baroque cultural flow of the Trevi Fountain, and the functional bridge-making of the Ponte Vecchio. The form is geometrically precise and scalable, reading equally as a diplomatic symbol and a wordless shorthand for Italy across OOH signage, stationery, apparel, and spatial environments. A tricolor accent bar grounds it in national identity without resorting to flag iconography.

The process was deliberately hybrid: MidJourney was used as a structured ideation tool to rapid-prototype across dozens of arch configurations, with editorial judgment applied at each stage to select, refine, and resolve toward a final mark that could hold the weight of institutional use. The result was a system with full multi-channel documentation, delivered in two colorways, navy and cream, and demonstrated across exterior signage, digital platforms, branded merchandise, and print collateral.