Trying to tell a city, a region, an entire community with a single brand is a very ambitious task.
But, at the same time, it is an operation which may return a lot in terms of representation and self-representation. Symbols have always been privileged object of communication, abstract places around which you can gather, ways to host the sense of belonging, elements through which it is possible to share expectations, ambitions, emotions, past, present, future.
In this sense, the brand of a community must principally speak.
Telling, building a narrative fabric.
It should represent what you are but also what you want to become. And it must do it in a simple way.
Prato is a community that has so much to say. So much to tell. A community in constant change. It's part of its DNA. Prato is a land of merchants and yarns, is a land of artists and innovators, is a land of landscapes and good flavors.
Prato is a land of passage, a crossroads in the foothills of the Apennines, hub between central Italy and the Po valley.
How to enclose so much in one brand?
John Berger in his "And our faces, my love, light as a picture", with great poetry tells us how men looking up to the sky saw the infinite spectacle of the stars and began to bind them with invisible lines. "Imagining the constellations did not change the stars, nor the black void that surrounds them, what changed was the way to read the night sky”.
The new brand of Prato is therefore not an invention or a discovery. But a new way to tell the infinity of stories and sense of this wonderful land.
And the website that accompanies it moves by this intention. Telling, so maybe unusual, what was, what is, what always will be Prato: a community story.