This article represents the first output of research on the communication campaign for “Fertility Day” that was launched by the Italian Ministry of Health in 2016. In front of a theme considered “sensitive” like that of couples fertility, discursive strategies, thematic frames, and the informative material distributed by the Ministry were at the center of an articulated dispute by audiences connected via social media and through creative-performative piazza protest by activist groups. The two forms of mobilization give rise to a response that can be read overall in terms of a true “counter campaign.” The areas of research reguarded the dimensions of public comunication, web mobilitization and lastly, political and cultural frameworks to which the campaign and countercampaign lend themselves. The study privileged the semantic dimension of the texts, recurring in particular to the analysis of content as investigation. The contribution proposes a reconstruction of the communicative campaign, the synthesis of salient passages of the creative countercampaign, and the themes of interest raised by the analysis of the document titled Piano Nazionale per la fertilità in which Fertility Day had its origin.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15781/6yya-m002