Who designed the six-legged dog, which means energy in Italy and in the world? The truth as to who invented it was not known officially until thirty years later. Luigi Broggini, in fact, never admitted authorship, and certainty about his being the father of the symbol only came after his death (1983), through the testimony of his son as reported by the journalist Dante Ferrari.

Luigi Broggini’s wish that his name should not be coupled with the winning drawing does not enable us to have an official definition of the real meaning of his “six-legged dog”. After the work had been attributed to the artist, there was talk about his having been influenced by the legends of the Niebelungen, by analogy with the themes of his formal research. The official interpretation, given by Eni’s press office in the 1950’s, explains the six legs of the imaginary animal as the sum of an automobile’s four wheels and the driver’s two legs. A sort of modern centaur, and also almost an assurance that this means of locomotion becomes the fastest possible through the symbiosis between automobile and driver. An interesting parallel can be made out also in African mythology, in which animals with more than the normal number of legs appear precisely to signify uncommon strength. In Tanzania and Kenya you can sometimes see lions and leopards with six legs among the carved wooden statuettes of Makonde art. In Nigeria, too, in the Benin bronzes, there are examples of animals represented with more than the ordinary number of legs, giving the idea of supernatural power.

This is the symbolic representation of a company, its "sign". Today, submerged as we are by the growing flood of words, information necessarily goes back to the symbol. The trademark integrates the heterogeneous elements of the image, and for this reason should remain unchanged for as long as possible. These are the impressions, conscious or otherwise, caused by the trademark which, together with other elements (quality of the product or of the service), form the company’s image in the consumer’s mind.

The logo is the “manner” of writing the company’s name. While the trademark has a visually distinguishing function, the logo has a mainly identifying one.

That is, it must be easily read in every dimension and on any material.

In many cases the two functions are performed by a single logo/trademark which sums up the characteristics of both the one and the other. This solution, which has noteworthy advantages since it reduces the essential elements of the image, is the one preferred by companies in the oil sector

ENI'S TRADEMARK

The trademark is the famous six-legged dog, an “imaginary-real” animal from whose mouth issues a red flame, its left front leg firmly on the ground and the others free in the air, like a car with its brakes on. It is a trademark that everyone has always recognized as a synonym for fuel.