With the installation “The six-legged dog: the history of an icon that looks to the future”, the Eni brand is the focus of an extraordinary exhibition resulting from the Company's collaboration with the ADI Design Museum in Milan and extending its reach to other art and design venues in Italy.

After its debut in Milan in May, the exhibition is being held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome from 18 June to 28 July, in partnership with Expodemic, the Festival of Foreign Academies and Cultural Institutes. This visual journey traces the evolution of the Eni brand from the 1950s to its new identities with Plenitude and Enilive, showing how the six-legged dog perfectly embodies Eni’s transformation and its long-standing values of energy, innovation and sustainability.

The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to see vintage posters, historic photographs and original artefacts connected with its history. 

Presented as an installation, the exhibition is visually inspired by the lines of the famous Bacciocchi service station, a Milanese icon of Eni design from the 1950s, and the narrative unfolds on two levels, that of the walls and that of the display islands. Photographs, posters, reproductions of physical objects and original drawings evoke places and contexts where the Six-legged Dog has been experienced by different generations and accompany the visitor on a journey through time of more than seventy years, culminating in the new visual identities of Plenitude and Enilive and Eni.

One energy from different energies

Today, the lines of the Six-legged dog find new interpretations in the logos of Plenitude and Enilive, with new colours, green and blue, to express the commitment of these new companies to renewable energies, biofuels and advanced solutions for increasingly sustainable energy and mobility. Just as a single energy can be created from different energies, the values that have always distinguished us are expressed in new ways, while renewing an original idea characterised by solidity and dynamism. 

1952: The original logo designed by Luigi Broggini under the pseudonym Giuseppe Guzzi

The history of the logo

Enrico Mattei himself in 1952 wanted a competition of ideas and an authoritative jury to devise Eni's logo. Some big personalities took part like Armando Testa and Fortunato Depero, but it was Luigi Broggini, a famous sculptor who registered under a pseudonym out of intellectual modesty, who invented the Six-Legged Dog. And now that dog has been walking alongside Italy for more than 70 years, going through some significant restylings (two signed by Bob Noorda) and yet maintaining its original trajectory: a tension towards the future, in a world undergoing profound transformation, today more than ever.

KeyFacts Energy: Eni Italy country profile