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This paper presents a case study of the brand 'Borsalino', whose communication strategy has evolved closely intertwined with the history of the company. The theoretical foundations of the present work stand in the history of advertising, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century, and in a semiotic approach which has allowed us to choose a coherent corpus of images, to compare them and to identify textual constants and variables, within a diacronic perspective.

La semiotica è la disciplina che ha prodotto la maggior quantità di strumenti utili per comprendere i significati espressi dai messaggi pubblicitari. Pertanto, pur all’interno di una prospettiva di tipo interdisciplinare, in questo articolo, dopo avere passato in rassegna i contributi storicamente più importanti per quanto riguarda l’analisi semiotica della pubblicità, verrà presentato un modello che deriva dalle ricerche sviluppate negli anni scorsi nell’ambito della semiotica. Tale modello è stato specificamente sviluppato per interpretare i messaggi pubblicitari e in seguito ne verrà mostrata l’efficacia applicandolo al celebre caso Panzani, già analizzato da Roland Barthes negli anni Sessanta. Semiotics is the discipline that has produced the greater amount of tools to explain the meanings of advertising messages. Therefore, this article adopt an interdisciplinary perspective, but, in particular, presents the most important works about the semiotic analysis of advertising and a new model that descends from the semiotic studies developed in the past years. This model has been specifically created to explain advertising messages and in this article it’s also applied to the well-known case of Panzani that Roland Barthes contended in the Sixties.

Semiotics is the discipline that has produced the greater amount of tools to explain the meanings of advertising messages. Therefore, this article adopt an interdisciplinary perspective, but, in particular, presents the most important works about the semiotic analysis of advertising and a new model that descends from the semiotic studies developed in the past years. This model has been specifically created to explain advertising messages and in this article it’s also applied to the well-known case of Panzani that Roland Barthes contended in the Sixties. La semiotica è la disciplina che ha prodotto la maggior quantità di strumenti utili per comprendere i significati espressi dai messaggi pubblicitari. Pertanto, pur all’interno di una prospettiva di tipo interdisciplinare, in questo articolo, dopo avere passato in rassegna i contributi storicamente più importanti per quanto riguarda l’analisi semiotica della pubblicità, verrà presentato un modello che deriva dalle ricerche sviluppate negli anni scorsi nell’ambito della semiotica. Tale modello è stato specificamente sviluppato per interpretare i messaggi pubblicitari e in seguito ne verrà mostrata l’efficacia applicandolo al celebre caso Panzani, già analizzato da Roland Barthes negli anni Sessanta.

L'articolo fa il punto sul mercato della pubblicità italiana negli ultimi anni, e sulle principali tendenze comunicative delle campagne pubblicitarie, sempre più focalizzate - ossessivamente - sulla rappresentazione del corpo umano (femminile, maschile, infantile).

This paper provides an overview of semiotic studies about advertising, beginning with the early work done in the 1960s. Advertising communication plays a particular role in semiotic studies in the second half of the twentieth century. Pioneering studies of advertising messages, in particular those of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, date to the 1960s and were carried out for the most part using the tools of classical rhetoric. Following a period in which semiotics displayed a relative lack of interest in advertisements, in the 1980s advertising texts were used as examples in applied narratological analysis by Jean-Marie Floch and others. This occurred at the same time as the so-called "passion turn of semiotics, " which stressed that the passions and emotions present in texts are crucial issues in textual semiotics, and it also seemed to offer fresh perspectives for the analysis of advertising communication. The passion turn took account of the evolution of advertising itself, since modern advertising is more and more interested in conveying passions and emotions. The effectiveness of an advert tends to be closely bound up with the presentation of sensations associated with a given product or brand. Recently, semioticians have begun to study more general features of advertising and marketing discourse.

Advertising texts have been widely studied from the linguistic and sociological points of view, and have also been one of the favoured objects of semiotic analysis (from Barthes and Eco to the recent developments of visual and social semiotics). They have not, however, received the same treatment by translation studies. Especially before the year 2000, promotional materials (including sub-genres such as advertising, publicity, and tourist brochures) were mainly used in general translation handbooks or textbooks as examples, or ‘special cases’ of translation. Although several specialized articles had already been published, systematic research into advertising translation per se started only very recently, with monographs (Guidère 2000a, Bueno García 2000) and edited volumes (Adab and Valdés 2004). Recent research also marked a shift away from purely linguistic or verbal-only approaches, opening up new insights into the intersemiotic and multimodal nature of advertising texts, while also highlighting the need to take the cultural dimension of advertising translation into account. The entry, after investigating the reasons why advertising has been long neglected by translation studies (it is a largely non-verbal genre), critically analyzes verbal-only, intersemiotic and cultural approaches to advertising translation, linking them to their respective theoretical backgrounds.