This interdisciplinary conference explores the visual cultures Italians have created, consumed, and been the subject of from early modernity to the contemporary post-text era. Italians—including inhabitants of the nation-state, members of the diaspora, and former colonial subjects—have been conceptualized, rendered, and understood to a large degree by the visual. Landscapes, individuals, objects, and cultural concepts have been the stuff of visual arts, media, advertisements, tourism, and vernacular renderings that concern Italy’s histories and identities within and beyond the country’s geopolitical boundaries. These and other visual frames are didactic modes by which tropes of Italy and Italians are promoted and consumed, contested and re-imagined.