1920-1990: Seventy Years of Fair Posters

The period from 1920, the year of the first “Campionaria” exhibition, to 1990, which marked the end of the “Grande Fiera di Aprile” (which had replaced the historic Campionaria in 1986), represents a pivotal historical journey for the role the Milan Campionaria Fair played in Italy’s economic, social, and political development. This era is also showcased by an extraordinary collection of posters, preserved in the Historical Archive.

From its very beginnings, Milan and the Fair have been inextricably linked. The Fair expanded and flourished around Milan’s urban, industrial, commercial, and service-sector model, acting as an “ever-progressing” element serving the entire country’s industrial system and the “Italian style.” This style brought with it technological innovation and creativity, architecture, industrial design, increasingly advanced infrastructure and services, and new cultural dimensions for social interaction and commercial exchange. The Fair’s showcase reflected national historical events, right up to the changes in our society. The Italian dream is clearly visible in these posters, offering clear “flashes” of both individual and national growth.

These posters, conveying social, political, and economic meanings, serve as fundamental evidence of promotional and advertising communication within a political and social reality far from detached or indifferent to the dramatic and significant changes in Italy’s history, society, and customs. The attention to communication demonstrated by the Milan Fair posters foreshadows other vocations of the city—those now expressed in information and advertising activities, as well as graphic design. In all these activities, the line between function and artistic value becomes blurred, and the artistic and experiential value that makes a message, a poster, or an object unique becomes increasingly significant.

With the war over and the Spanish Flu pandemic passed, the atmosphere was highly charged in both the countryside and cities, agitated by socialist propaganda proclaiming mass revolt and organizing strikes and demonstrations. Unemployment was rampant across the country, and the entire system seemed paralyzed. There was an urgent need to reconfigure productive structures, reignite commerce, restart the economy, and look with confidence towards both domestic and foreign markets.

In this challenging context, yet one permeated with enthusiasm and a desire for rebirth, on November 1, 1919, journalist Marco Bolaffio officially announced the birth of the Milan Sample Fair (Fiera Campionaria di Milano), scheduled to take place from April 12 to 27, 1920.

The first poster for the Sample Fair, created by Leonardo Dudreville, already subtly reveals the expectations animating the event’s promoters and the hopes of a society emerging devastated from World War I, painstakingly trying to bring order back into its economic and social life. Vismara’s 1922 poster urged the country towards reconstruction, as the Milan Fair prepared to leave its temporary location at the Bastioni di Porta Venezia and move to the area that had hosted the International Exposition in 1906.

For the Milan Fair, a construction process began that, between 1923 and 1928, would see it build almost one hundred thousand square meters of buildings at a cost of over forty million lire, entirely self-financed. The Milan Fair acquired the city’s former Piazza d’Armi from state property, thus the fourth edition of the Fair moved to the district that would host it for the next eighty-two years. The first masonry pavilions built were the Palazzo dello Sport in Piazza VI Febbraio, Milan’s first indoor sports facility, and the Palazzine degli Orafi in Largo Domodossola, which still houses Fondazione Fiera Milano today.

The policy of autarky, which began with the very advent of Fascism, became Italy’s key theme in the second half of the 1930s: a moral imperative, even more than an economic one, influencing every individual and collective choice.

The Milan Fair provided a platform for Italian inventions and showcased national creative genius, entrepreneurial courage, and imaginative design.

In doing so, it redefined its own nature, ceasing to be the place of free technical and commercial exchange with foreign countries for which it was born after World War I. Instead, it became the premier showcase for national production. All of this, however, without losing the wealth of relationships and experiences accumulated over more than fifteen years of activity.

The fairgrounds were by now completed, boasting over one hundred thousand square meters of exhibition space.

Between the nights of June 15 and 16, 1940, Milan endured its first aerial bombardment. As the Wehrmacht invaded Russia and the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Italians struggled to carry on with their daily lives. However, everyday existence was hampered by difficulties of every kind.

The Milan Fair continued to operate until 1942. The Sample Fairs of a country at war, isolated and disoriented, still took place. The number of exhibitors drastically decreased, while visitors remained around two million. This indicates that people, despite being frightened and without prospects for the future, chose the Fair as a moment of leisure and a connection with the rest of the world. The products on display were primarily related to wartime activities.

In 1943, the city suffered severe damage: hundreds of industries were hit, destroyed, or badly damaged; twelve thousand civilian and public buildings were demolished; power plants were blocked; and the communication and transport networks were nearly unusable. The bombings also devastated the Fair district, destroying seventy percent of its structures and causing very severe economic losses.

From 1943 to 1945, the Campionaria closed its doors, leaving a sense of uncertainty about the future.

One year after the war ended, there was a strong determination to re-establish the Fair, just as Italians were determined to rebuild the country. Luigi Gasparotto, one of the Fair’s founding fathers, headed the new Committee.

Economic and cultural restoration proceeded in parallel. On April 11, 1946, the Casa della Cultura Association was established in Milan; its members included Alberto Mondadori, director of “Nuovo Corriere della Sera,” architect Nathan Rogers, publisher Giulio Einaudi, and writer Elio Vittorini. For months, thousands of workers labored to build the new Campionaria Fair, and on June 28, Enrico De Nicola was elected as the provisional Head of State, participating in the inauguration on September 12. The numbers were lower, but held immense value after the conflict; there were also many foreign exhibitors, signaling a move away from autarky.

In this 24th edition of the Fair, a slight breath of hope and timid confidence in the future emerged, also visible in the poster created by Studio Crix, which was very similar in 1947. The 25th Milan Fair, held in June, simultaneously celebrated twenty-five years of the Campionaria and fifty years of radio, to which the grand “Mostra Marconiana” (Marconi Exhibition) was dedicated. This was also the period when Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler founded the Piccolo Teatro, and when projects for the QT8 district and the “montagnetta” (small mountain) of San Siro were presented. Furthermore, on December 22 of that year, Parliament approved the Italian Constitution. In 1948, the Fair finally reopened on its traditional dates: from April 12 to 27. The success was incredible: visitors reached three million. From this year on, the arrival of the President of the Republic in the city became a regular appointment for Milan, which could boast two unique features: being the irreplaceable engine of the Italian economy and presenting itself as the country’s showcase to international markets. Matteo Bottoli’s poster precisely expressed these themes. Shortly before the opening of the 26th edition of the Fair, Italy had joined the Atlantic Pact. In ’49, the Campionaria maintained high numbers and gave ample space to inventions, an aspect emphasized by Corrado Mancioli’s poster.

In the 1950s, Italy’s socio-economic situation shifted significantly, and with it, the Fair’s posters, which fully reflected the spirit of the times. A rapid change in mentality and political attitude occurred, leading to an openness towards the world and its markets. One factor in the economic growth was also the low cost of labor; however, the increase in Italian incomes was substantial, contributing to the birth of a mass market.

All of this is evident in the new posters, which no longer feature flags and Olympian deities but ordinary people, photographed in color. During these years, the posters appeared in multiple languages, aligning with the Fair’s international spirit. After the 1950 poster, still stylistically similar to those of the previous decade, photographs began to appear; first with James Whitmore in 1951, then with the Publifoto agency in ’52, ’53, ’54, and ’55. In 1952, to coincide with the Fair’s opening, Rai inaugurated its production center in Corso Sempione; in September, the first national news broadcast would air. In the ’53 edition, the central themes were Chemistry, with an exhibition celebrating “The Era of Plastics,” and Television.

During these years, a national industrial style emerged, beginning to enter Italian homes through the TV program Carosello, a cultural phenomenon of the new mass culture. However, there was also a fear that Italian companies might not be able to withstand competition from more advanced countries, due to what the Minister of Foreign Trade, Guido Carli, called a national “inferiority complex” — a judgment the Fair sought to disprove. In 1956, the Campionaria continued to grow, with visitors now exceeding four million, and it installed escalators. At the same time, in the city, construction began on the Torre Velasca by BBPR and the Pirelli skyscraper by Gio Ponti.

The following year, the Fair presented polypropylene, a new polymer discovered by Giulio Natta, for which he would win the Nobel Prize. This material, called Moplen, would become a symbol of those years, known as the “plastic years.” The author of the ’57 poster was Ezio Bonini, one of the most acclaimed graphic designers of the new Milanese school – a context of art applied to industry, composed of graphic designers, painters, and visual designers who learned from Bauhaus and looked to the graphics of Bob Noorda or Bruno Munari. By the end of the decade, Milan was the Italian center of visual communication between art and advertising.

In 1958, the Campionaria anticipated the theme of space adventures, while in ’59 it presented the exhibition “Applications of Nuclear Energy”.

In the 1960s, Italian society experienced a period of significant economic prosperity. It was during these years that the “Made in Italy” phenomenon truly solidified. The graphic design of posters in the sixties experimented with the repetition of geometric figures and abstraction.

1960 was the year of the Rome Olympics, and the Fair highlighted sports disciplines. In April 1961, Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth; documenting his return from space was James Whitmore, the photographer behind the 1951 Milan Fair poster. The Cold War and the raising of the Berlin Wall created strong global tensions. To seek greater political and economic stability during a period of such unrest, the Fair Authority created the CIS, International Exchange Center, dedicated to fostering foreign participation. The lively graphics of Ezio Bonini returned in this year’s poster and in subsequent ones from ’62 and ’63. By the middle of the decade, the Fair increased its exhibition space but saw a slow decline in visitors and exhibitors, coinciding with a slowdown in the country’s development surge.

In 1964, the Campionaria’s theme was water and the safeguarding of water resources, a theme echoed in the poster where this time Bonini collaborated with his two partners from Studio CBC, Umberto Capelli and Aldo Calabresi. From 1965, Studio CBC’s graphic choices leaned towards a highly appreciated solution at the time: the creative use of typographic lettering. In these images, the repetition of the words “Fiera di Milano” alluded to the lines of computer code, just as the Olivetti Programma 101, the world’s first personal computer, was being presented in New York. Lettering compositions returned in the ’67 and ’69 posters, while those from ’66 and ’68, by the same artists, revisited the style of Bonini’s previous works, with chromatic and compositional variations of geometric figures. In 1969, Neil Armstrong made the first journey to the Moon, declaring upon his return: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” The ’68 movements had also reached Italy; the economic situation had changed, and on December 12, ’69, the terrible Piazza Fontana bombing occurred. The era of enthusiastic growth had ended, and the new decade was viewed with uncertainty and fear.

In November 1973, following the Arab-Israeli War, oil-producing countries decided to quadruple the price of crude oil while reducing production. All industrialized nations were hit by a wave of recession, including Italy, where inflation became the highest in the Western world. Falling employment and incomes risked destroying the delicate balance between capital and labor that had been achieved in industrial societies through welfare policies. Political division became ideological, and cultural clashes turned physical in factories, public squares, and universities. The oil crisis, inflation, monetary chaos, unemployment and wage reductions, armed struggle, and terrorism brought the Western system to the brink of collapse.

However, new schools of thought emerged from this negative situation, linked to a different conception of the environment, a new approach to energy resource utilization, and a more equitable global distribution of wealth. Just as had happened in the past, a new economic and social path, based on innovations in technology and thought, began to take shape from a seemingly insoluble crisis.

A new technological landscape, driven by cybernetics, information technology, and microelectronics, from the use of robots as a workforce to the use of personal computers for managing enormous amounts of data, from the use of artificial intelligence to high-speed mobile communication—the world changed its perspectives on the criteria for producing and consuming goods and services, on learning techniques and times, and on methods of training and knowledge transfer. We were facing a true generational shift. The youth of ’68 had delivered a cultural shock to the system, highlighting its contradictions, but ultimately they were still “analog” youth, striving to modify a world of which they were an integral part. The future now glimpsed, however, concerned a generation yet to be born.

From cameras to computers, from oil tankers to microprocessors, Japan and the emerging Pacific countries brought forth not only the power of their workforce but also the sophistication and specialization of a social system. Driven by the new Japanese model, Europe also underwent radical transformation with the rise of advanced tertiary industries and the introduction of significant process and product innovations within large, traditional manufacturing factories.

The historian Giuseppe Maria Longoni, in his volume “The Fair in the History of Milan,” wrote that the brand mark designed by Lelo Cremonesi was “almost a return to origins, an appeal to the charm of a secure tradition of proud mercantile and Milanese industriousness to face the complex and sometimes disorienting contemporary reality.”

For the 1980 poster, Cremonesi used the new symbol, repeating it six times along the horizontal axis, fading colors from blue to yellow and slightly offsetting the figures’ positions to achieve a curious “off-register” effect, similar to stereoscopic images.

In 1984, the President of the Republic Sandro Pertini visited the Milan Fair and “greeted the world of production, welcomed by a jubilant crowd.” It had been twelve years since a head of state had reviewed the Campionaria’s pavilions. At the end of his visit, the most beloved Italian president stated: “The Milan Fair has always been the annual event that most significantly summarized the phases of our arduous, difficult, but certain ascent.”

Exhibition Curated by: Camilla Bianchi, Katia Cusmà, Francesco Negri.

Brera Academy of Fine Arts. Course in Communication and Enhancement of Archival Heritage, taught by Professor Maria Canella.

Academic Year 2024 / 2025