ITA Airways' special livery for the Winter Olympics is beautiful (but a star is missing!)

For a long time the Special liveries are no longer just stickers on a fuselage. Today, aircraft have become real flying canvas, huge surfaces that cross skies, airports and continents telling stories, values, identities. Traveling works of art, observed by millions of people often without even realizing it.

In Italy, an iconic livery by definition has been there and has remained in the collective memory: Alitalia's Boeing 747 with Baci Perugina.. A masterpiece of branding and imagery, a child of an era when people really dared. From there on we have seen everything: successful experiments, forgettable attempts and - let's face it - even frankly ugly stuff, placed on aircraft more out of commercial obligation than vision.

On the international scene, however, Emirates is probably the company that most understood the power of special livery: its A380s have often become huge narrative, celebratory, spectacular billboards. Some questionable, some successful, but always consistent with the idea that an airplane is not only a means of transportation, but a symbol that flies.

And this is precisely where ITA Airways comes in, which after Having retired the "Friuli Venezia Giulia" e Repainted the Born in 2021, Now he has a new special uniform.

When ITA turns an airplane into a cultural manifesto

With the Olympic livery designed by Emiliano Ponzi, ITA Airways Does something rare: does not "stick" an event on the plane, but tells about it.

Institutional blue becomes the sky on which mountains, athletes, leaps, movements take shape. There is nothing shouted, nothing didactic. It is a narrative made of suggestions: the jump, the speed, the concentration, the silence before the effort. Flight as a natural extension of sport.

Ponzi uses his signature style - clean, symbolic, elegant - to transform the fuselage into a story continues, which reads as the plane rolls, takes off, parks at the gate. It is a livery that works from a distance, but rewards those who get up close and observe the details. And that is perhaps its greatest asset: Not tired, not aging, not screaming.

The most beautiful ITA livery ever (and more)

Without turning around too much: this is the most beautiful livery ever made by ITA Airways.

But not only that. It is also one of the best special liveries ever seen on an Italian aircraft and quietly competitive with the best international examples of recent years.

Because he succeeds in a most difficult thing: Holding national identity, global event and aesthetic taste together, without falling into rhetoric or pushy marketing. It doesn't look like a "commissioned" livery, it looks like a livery thought.

At a time when many companies simply change a logo or add a sticker, ITA chooses to take it a step further: use the airplane to tell the story of Italy moving, flying, looking ahead. And when an airplane can do this while crossing the Alps or parking in a foreign airport, then yes: It's no longer just a plane, it's a message.

And this time, it must be said, a beautiful message. I just don't casp how come there is no Star Alliance logo.

• Special livery