The major novelty of the Venice Film Festival this year will be the Lancia Café, a discreet, friendly meeting place on the terrace of the Venice Lido's Hotel Westin Excelsior, where the festival's leading personalities can get together for an aperitif in a refined, relaxing atmosphere. The Lancia Café will also be a venue where up-and-coming talents, producers and the media can meet and that will host one-to-one interviews with directors and actors and press conferences.

In line with the brand's new feel, Lancia Cafés are being opened throughout Europe. These are places where people can meet and get to know the 'Lancia world', enabling them to learn about and appreciate the brand's history, offering daily news items and details of future initiatives relating to the brand. The same spirit will be found in showrooms that will be opened in coming years and exhibition spaces at international motor shows. An example will be the Lancia Café organised for the 64th edition of the Venice International Film Festival.

The Lancia Café concept is based on extremely high quality standards. Every detail – from interior design to food – will be fully in line with elegant character and quality, hallmarks of Lancia cars. It will come as no surprise that Lancia Café furnishings will fully reflect the elegance and quality craftsmanship of Lancia car interiors: use of real leather, immaculate stitching, perfect in every detail. So Lancia Café is a real showcase for the brand, offering a relaxed, convivial atmosphere in a sophisticated lounge setting. Plus it will be a space in continuous evolution, dynamic, just right for hosting cultural events and parties in line with the traditional hallmarks of the Lancia brand: originality, international appeal, elegance.

The general project concept was the result of a semantic study of the brand's values and reformulation of the logo. First and foremost, the brand's unique shield logo, which comprises three curved, broken lines, and is certainly the characteristic feature of both the design of its cars and of details (like the grille). On a higher plane, this element becomes the architectural theme, the leitmotiv of the project concept.

The broken lines interpreted as architectural elements give rise to a system of scenic wings that, depending on their position and materials used, characterise and convey a more or less 'dense' image of the space they occupy. The various types of materials adopted for the wings (glass, perforated sheet-metal, plasterboard and backlit images) contribute to creating an image of a deconstructed, filtered, dynamic space: a non-orthogonal, unconventional environment in line with the unique design of Lancia models. But then for more than a century motorists have admired Lancia cars for their technical originality, innovative content, refined and prestigious materials.
 

Elegant, and at the same time surprising lines and colours. A brand that, having celebrated its one hundredth anniversary, aims to continue to surprise with initiatives like the Lancia Café, which thanks to its furnishings and atmosphere is the most appropriate environment for recounting and bringing to life all the sense of well-being and equilibrium offered by its cars. Every detail of a Lancia Café has been and will be focused on promoting and gratifying a characteristic of those who feel part of the 'Lancia world'. And now based on the very same Lancia Café concept the brand has launched Lancia Boutique, a refined, enchanted setting where visitors can admire an outstanding collection of clothing and accessories produced in cooperation with leading fashion houses.

So the Lancia Café concept is perfectly in line with today's winning version of 'Italian style' universally represented by Cinema, Fashion and Design. Lancia is present in all three fields with sponsorship, marketing and communication activities, confirming its status as 'an exciting player on the motoring scene and a refined interpreter of the contemporary world'. But then Lancia believes the appeal of a model takes in much more than the product's typical features, which both the press and market know and appreciate. It also includes brand experience and a series of inherent values it manages to transmit. In this sense, exhibition and showroom areas must also express the concepts of Elegance and Attitude, the underlying theme of the Lancia Café project based on a concept devised by Ludovica and Roberto Palomba, produced by the Costa Group.

In short, the Lancia Café confirms the brand's extraordinary vitality, a brand that after one century of activity still manages to maintain its own specific identity, namely, a builder of cars that are the synthesis of comfort, elegance and cutting-edge technology. And with the same spirit and purpose the brand will tackle the coming years by continuously proposing important new initiatives in the motoring field. For instance, 2006 saw the launch of the New Ypsilon, today’s biggest seller, and the announcement of the new Delta HPE that will be on sale starting 2008. Today it is New Musa's turn to engage with 2007. However, there are other new ventures in the pipeline. The brand has set itself a target of annual registrations of 300,000 by 2010, to be achieved by promoting its history, DNA and unique style. On the basis of these guidelines it aims to consolidate its position in the Italian market and exploit opportunities in other major European markets, in addition to focusing on new markets like Russia, Turkey, Scandinavia and, later, the UK and Japan.