Milan's Duplicate Image Crisis: The Key Decisions Ahead for the City's Visual Identity

Milan has a problem it can no longer ignore. Across dozens of official tourism portals, Olympic promotional materials and municipal design briefs, the same photographs keep appearing — stock images licensed multiple times, recycled across competing campaigns, and in several cases flagged by rights-holders for unlicensed duplication. The city's communications offices now face a hard deadline: with the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics opening ceremony scheduled for February 6, the window for corrective action is narrowing fast.

The issue matters right now because Milan is preparing the most scrutinised public-facing campaign in its recent history. The Olympics will draw accredited journalists from more than 80 countries to venues stretching from the Palafianco arena to the Cortina slopes, and every piece of imagery attached to the city's brand will be examined. A duplicated or improperly licensed photograph is not merely an administrative embarrassment — it can trigger takedown orders, generate negative press cycles and, in the worst cases, result in civil claims that pause entire promotional rollouts.

Where the Problem Sits — and Who Owns It

The duplication issue has surfaced across at least three distinct layers of Milan's public communications architecture. The first is the Comune di Milano's own digital estate, where the VisitMilan portal has carried overlapping images sourced from multiple agency contracts signed between 2023 and 2025. The second layer involves Milano & Partners, the public-private body that leads international investment and tourism promotion for the city, which runs separate image libraries that have not always been reconciled with municipal holdings. The third layer is the Milan-Cortina 2026 organising committee's marketing division, which drew on both external agencies and contributed city assets — with sign-off processes that insiders have described as insufficiently coordinated, though no formal finding has been published.

The neighbourhood most visually overexposed is Porta Nuova, the regenerated district anchored by the Bosco Verticale towers on Via Garibaldi. Aerial photographs of those towers have been licensed, sub-licensed and reproduced so frequently across European city-branding campaigns that rights disputes have become routine. The Fondazione Riccardo Catella, which manages the Biblioteca degli Alberi park adjacent to the towers, commissioned an independent image audit in spring 2025 precisely because of concerns about third-party use of photography taken within the park's boundaries.

Decisions That Will Define the Next Six Months

Three choices now sit on the desks of city officials and Olympic organisers. The first is whether to commission a full proprietary image library — original photography shot under work-for-hire contracts that would vest copyright entirely in the municipality. London did exactly this ahead of the 2012 Olympics, building a library of more than 12,000 images that were made freely available to accredited media. The cost of an equivalent exercise for Milan has been estimated by at least one Milanese creative agency at between €800,000 and €1.2 million, though no publicly tendered contract has yet appeared in the Comune's procurement register.

The second decision involves the Brera district. Several of the most-duplicated images show the Pinacoteca di Brera on Via Brera and the surrounding streets during Fashion Week. The Pinacoteca's own communications office must clarify usage rights for images shot on public approaches to the building — a grey area that Italian copyright law treats differently from images taken inside a licensed venue.

The third and most immediately pressing decision is procedural. Milano & Partners and the Milan-Cortina 2026 committee need a single shared digital asset management system before October, when pre-Games promotional spending accelerates sharply. Without one, the duplication problem will compound rather than resolve.

For journalists, designers and agencies working with the city's image in the second half of 2026, the practical advice is straightforward: request a written chain-of-title document for any photograph provided through official Milan channels, confirm whether usage rights cover broadcast as well as digital, and build a 72-hour clearance buffer into any production schedule. The city is moving to fix this. Whether it moves fast enough is the question that will be answered before the Olympic flame arrives.