Aostae 2025: How to Govern a National Anniversary

When a territory turns 2,050 years old, communicating it is an act of responsibility. Turning it into a system, however, is governance.

In 25 BC, the Romans founded a settlement in northern Italy. Two thousand and fifty years later, the arches and towers of that place still stand. A walk through the city reveals a stone theatre, underground cryptoporticoes and walls that time has spared.

Yet despite this extraordinarily rich historical heritage, in 2024 the same city had no real online presence and no recognizable voice. No unified visual identity had ever been created for its events. No community. No system.

The history was there. The narrative was missing.

Aostae 2025 is the project created by the Municipality of Aosta and the Autonomous Region of the Aosta Valley to celebrate 2,050 years since the foundation of Augusta Praetoria. It was a high-profile institutional mandate involving multiple public actors, cultural bodies, heritage authorities, territorial partners and a calendar of events extending across the entire year.

An important responsibility, to be approached with rigour. Bliss took it on.

The Problem: Institutional Complexity as an Obstacle to Coherence

Major public anniversaries almost always share the same structural problem. Multiple institutions are involved, decision-making levels overlap, and everybody brings legitimate but partly divergent objectives.

Without a central direction, the result is usually fragmented communication.

Aostae 2025 was no exception.

The project had only a minimal digital presence. Its Instagram profile had 807 followers when the mandate began. The institutional language was formal, cold, and distant from the audiences the project wanted to reach. Internal bureaucratic procedures restricted Meta sponsorships. The visual identities of individual events did not exist as a coherent system.

The challenge was therefore structural before it was communicative: a complex institutional ecosystem carrying the weight of an anniversary without the tools required to do so.

The Solution: One Control Room for a Complex Ecosystem

Bliss made the strategic choice to manage Aostae 2025 as a system rather than a campaign.

What is the difference? A campaign has a beginning and an end. A system has continuity, coherence, and the ability to adapt to events without losing its identity. For a territorial project spread over twelve months, with dozens of events and several institutions involved, only a system can create lasting value.

We therefore became the central control room connecting the Municipality of Aosta, the Autonomous Region of the Aosta Valley and the Superintendency of Cultural Heritage, aligning divergent objectives around a single direction. The mandate operated simultaneously across three dimensions: strategic alignment among institutions and territorial stakeholders; operational governance of internal flows, from approvals to quality control; and multichannel execution across every project touchpoint.

The Value: Heritage as a Territorial Positioning Asset

Augusta Praetoria is one of the best-preserved Roman foundations in Europe. A theatre, a triumphal arch, a forum, cryptoporticoes, baths and the MegaMuseum. Centuries of historical stratification that no competing territory can replicate.

This heritage had an activation problem. It existed in the physical reality of the city, but not in the digital imagination of the national and international audiences it needed to reach.

The value to be built was therefore the transformation of history into an architecture of positioning. Augusta Praetoria had to become a contemporary cultural reference, present in the attention of people under thirty-five, tourists from outside the region, and international visitors. The project needed an active community, embedded in a system capable of sustaining it beyond a single season of events.

The weight of 2,050 years of history is a rare resource. Governing it creates a competitive advantage that ordinary advertising expenditure cannot produce. This was the one true territory to own.

The Action: Building the System, Piece by Piece

The first intervention concerned identity. The Aostae 2025 logo was treated as a strategic asset: a symbol capable of combining Roman heritage with a contemporary language, scalable across institutional materials, urban signage, social graphics and the website without losing strength or recognizability.

Around the logo, we built a complete colour, typography and composition system, with guidelines for continuous production and rules of coherence for every event in the calendar. Augusta Civitas, Veni Vidi Augusta, Tracce di Memoria, the European Archaeology Days, Eternity and the Winter Solstice each received an autonomous visual identity integrated into the master system.

The second intervention was the aostae2025.it website, designed as the central information and narrative hub. Interactive calendars, thematic pages, dedicated editorial journeys, an integrated booking system and streaming. A point of convergence between institutional communication and cultural storytelling.

The third intervention was the governance of social channels. Instagram was managed through recurring formats, identity-led storytelling around Roman heritage and a language capable of crossing the boundary between institutional communication and pop culture without losing authority. The teaser campaign “Do not follow us if…” generated 1,431 new followers in a single month. TikTok followed an organic distribution strategy, with 97% of traffic coming from the For You feed and no dedicated budget.

The fourth intervention was the Meta Ads strategy, treated as a governance lever for territorial demand. Fourteen campaigns were activated, maintaining a cost per click between EUR 0.16 and EUR 0.26 against a sector average of EUR 0.45. Bureaucratic friction in public procedures was resolved through a privately managed Bliss Business Manager, guaranteeing uninterrupted operational continuity.

Results

2,050 Years, Communicated in the Present

In ten months of the mandate, Aostae 2025 built something no institutional anniversary in the Aosta Valley had ever built before.

The Instagram profile grew from 807 to 5,074 organic followers: an increase of 528%, without purchasing followers or manipulating the algorithm. Presence, coherence and editorial strategy. Total views across Instagram and TikTok exceeded 1.2 million, with a monthly peak of 327,000 views in July. More than 80% of the people reached were new visitors, with national distribution.

The aostae2025.it website recorded 7,000 unique visitors in August, with an average session duration of between three and four minutes. The public-sector benchmark is under one minute.

The numbers describe the construction of an attention asset the project did not previously possess. An asset that does not disappear at the end of the mandate. It remains. It settles. And it becomes fundamental to communication in the years that follow.

Five thousand digital ambassadors built in ten months. A legacy that belongs to the city. And one we hope will last another 2,050 years.

BLISS®
© 2026. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED