RM 4:

The country into the city.

With this name I want to identify an advertising campaign issued by Barilla, of Parma, since the year 1994, and based on an extraordinary visual image, as for invention and for beauty. In various Italian plazas, and even in the Venetian sea, as we can see in the image below, the wheat grows.

From a rhetorical point of view it is an oxymoron (presence or coincidence of the opposite). The country and the city, by each other, are the opposite poles of a landscape, for which where the country is, the town cannot have its room and vice versa. I believe that this is the first visual oxymoron never tried, or at least is the first in my knowledge, and it comes from computer morphing of the image.

The filmed or TV sequence contained even these words: At the beginning: " The balanced lightness . . . you can find it even where the wheat is exaggerated." In tail: "Who is healthy is eating, he finds the nature . . . even in Venice." Now, the oxymoron, as every figure of speech by opposition, has the task to attract the attention. If its purpose was only this, all well. Otherwise, if it even had to promote the marketing of Barilla products, I fear that it did not reach the success it would have deserved. This because this strong oxymoron did not get balanced in a suitable way from convincing reasoning, or from a figure of speech of persuasion. The initial words are ambiguous.

The final metaphor is weak and a little overelaborate, and it does not keep away from the visual image, which remains preponderant. So, the resultant message could elicit the reactive thought: "Though you might say, we could never see wheat in the sea of Venice."

Aknowledgement. Many thanks to Ufficio Storico of Barilla, of Parma (Italy), and to its kind executive, mr. Giancarlo Gonizzi, for having sent me the photo and the related text.

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