The Comitato Olimpico Nazionale Italiano (CONI), Italy’s National Olympic Committee, has used a series of distinct visual identities since its founding in 1914. Its current mark, introduced in 2014 for the committee’s centenary, is a modern revival of the tricolour shield historically worn by Italian athletes.
Design and History
In 1947, following the end of the monarchy and the Fascist era, the royal crown and fasces were removed from the CONI logo. For the 1960 Rome Olympics, the mark was simplified to an acronym accompanied by the Olympic rings and a star, though its execution varied in the absence of strict guidelines.[1]
In 1968, with the launch of the “Youth Games,” CONI commissioned graphic designer Mimmo Castellano to restyle the logo. Castellano created an essential, rigorous mark in which the first three letters were generated by a single ribbon. Because the white fillets tended to disappear in small reproductions, a further restyling was made in 1984, lightening the structure with blue lines.[1]
In 2004, the Inarea agency was tasked with creating the identity for the Italian Olympic national team, known as I-team, which later also became the identity of CONI itself. That design featured a shield built from lines matching the thickness of the individual letters of the word “Italy,” with the first three letters green and the rest red.[1]
For CONI’s hundredth anniversary, Inarea was again chosen to redefine the identity. The new logo, unveiled on 7 May 2014 at a press conference at the Foro Italico, revived the famous tricolour shield long sewn on the jerseys of Italian athletes.[1][2] The redesign was described by the European Olympic Committees as “a return to the future,” with CONI President Giovanni Malagò calling it “innovative, but in tune with history and tradition.”[3]
Meaning and Symbolism
The 2014 emblem is a tricolour shield with an elegant gold border, the word “Italia” above it, and the five Olympic rings surmounting the whole composition.[1][2] The placement of the Olympic rings above the shield marked a change from the previous mark, where they appeared below.[4] The shield itself is a direct reference to the historic emblem worn by Italian national teams, connecting the committee’s governance role to the sporting heritage of the country.[5]
Typography and Design
The 2004 CONI logo was composed using the capitalized Frutiger typeface. The 2014 redesign replaced this with the Gotham typeface for the capitalized “CONI” lettering.[1] The switch to Gotham was also noted by the German design publication Design Tagebuch, which observed that the typeface provided the typographic accent for the centenary redesign.[6]
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