Milan's Duplicate Image Problem: The Key Decisions That Will Shape the City's Visual Identity

Milan has a duplicate image problem, and the clock is running. With the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics less than six months away, the city's communications offices, cultural institutions and private sponsors are sitting on overlapping, often contradictory visual archives — tens of thousands of photographs, renderings and promotional assets that have been reused, reposted and reformatted to the point where nobody can say with confidence which version is the authoritative one.

The issue surfaced publicly in late June when the Comune di Milano's communications directorate flagged concerns internally about duplicated promotional imagery appearing across both official Olympic channels and third-party tourism campaigns. The problem is not merely aesthetic. Under European Union copyright rules, specifically the 2019 EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which Italy transposed into national law by 2021, using a replicated image without tracing its original licence chain exposes institutions to liability. For a city that generated an estimated €7.2 billion in tourism revenue in 2024, according to figures published by the Milan Chamber of Commerce, getting this wrong publicly — and during an Olympic year — carries real reputational weight.

Where the Decisions Get Made

The immediate pressure point is the Palazzo Marino, seat of Milan's municipal government on Piazza della Scala, where the communications and culture departments are expected to present a unified digital asset management protocol to the city council before the end of July. The protocol would establish a single, searchable repository for all approved city imagery, with metadata tagging to prevent duplicate deployment across campaigns.

Triennale Milano, the design museum and cultural institution on Viale Alemagna that has co-produced several Olympic promotional exhibitions this year, is among the partners being asked to audit its own image library. The institution holds archives dating back decades, and staff have been working since May to cross-reference its holdings against material circulating on the official Milano Cortina 2026 Foundation's digital channels. The Foundation itself, headquartered near CityLife in the western development corridor, has committed to completing a full asset review by September 1.

The stakes are sharpest in Porta Nuova, the glass-and-steel district north of the central station that has become the default backdrop for virtually every piece of contemporary Milan promotional material produced in the past decade. The neighbourhood's skyline — the Bosco Verticale twin towers designed by Boeri Studio, the UniCredit Tower, the pedestrianised Piazza Gae Aulenti — appears in an estimated 40 percent of all Milan destination imagery indexed on major stock platforms, according to a 2025 analysis by the Milan Polytechnic's urban communications research group. That concentration means a single licensing ambiguity in one source photograph can cascade across dozens of derivative campaigns.

What Comes Next

Three decisions will define how this plays out between now and the February 2026 Olympic opening ceremony. First, the Comune must decide whether to mandate a centralised licensing hub or allow institutions to manage their own archives under a shared taxonomy. The centralised model costs more upfront — early estimates from the communications directorate put scoping and build costs in the range of €400,000 to €600,000 — but dramatically reduces long-term liability exposure. Second, the Milano Cortina 2026 Foundation needs to clarify which photographic partners hold exclusivity over key venues, including Piazza del Duomo and the Arena Civica in Parco Sempione, both of which have been shot under multiple competing commercial agreements.

Third, and perhaps most consequential for Milan's fashion and design economy, the city's major luxury houses — several of which have formal cultural partnerships with Olympic programmes — will need to decide whether their own brand imagery, heavily featuring Milan streetscapes, falls inside or outside the scope of any new municipal protocol. That conversation involves legal teams, not just communications directors, and it has not yet formally started.

The window is narrow. September is when Olympic logistics move from planning to execution. Institutions that have not resolved their image archives by then will be managing the problem in public, during the most watched period in the city's recent history. The decisions are bureaucratic. The consequences are not.