Introduction

The current global context is characterized by high levels of geopolitical, economic, social and political instability. A clear manifestation of this is the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in the heart of Europe between Ukraine and Russia, the Israeli-Palestinian war but also the extreme weather events that are having significant effects in various parts of the world, placing on the agenda a renewed demand for security, physical and structural, on the part of the population.

In this scenario, there are two essential elements that represent an innovation compared to past eras, such as the strong interdependence and interconnection of social systems subjected to stress.

This aspect has emerged explicitly with the impact of the pandemic, with which all the world’s social systems have had to confront, considering the effects of economic and political interdependence between the different components of society.

The existence of individuals and societies has always been characterized by change due to new technological discoveries, new emerging needs that translate into different cultural approaches and the consequent changed practices of social life.

However, change is also a determinant of the crisis and can be considered both in the pre-crisis phase, in which the foundations have been established and signs of vulnerability begin to appear, and in the post-crisis phase characterized by the search for a new normality, as a social system subjected to a crisis of any nature will no longer have the same structure as it had before the impact of the crisis.

In accordance with this perspective and the typical elements of the contemporary world, it becomes essential to question the methods of crisis governance, deepening the vision of crisis management and in particular of crisis communication.

For these reasons, the present reflection wants to focus on some specific aspects such as a reflection on the concept of crisis, taking into account its historical evolution and the conceptual declinations it has reached over the last few years. In addition, it is considered essential to proceed with the consideration of the approaches and models of governance and crisis management that have been considered in general over the last decades when these disciplines have established themselves and subsequently with a specific consideration of the case of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy.

In particular, the study and analysis of crisis communication and its governance applied to the Italian case of the pandemic allow us to understand the essential role of communication and crisis narratives in the broader framework of crisis planning and communication.

The general aim of this work is to provide an in-depth and innovative reflection on the communication practices and narratives that have emerged from the Italian case of pandemic crisis management in its early stages of manifestation, with particular attention to the digital dimension of crisis communication.

In the past, the issue of the relevance of communication in the context of governance and crisis management had already been highlighted (Lombardi, 2005), underlining the crucial role of communication methods and dynamics in critical contexts.

In fact, the communicative value for the governance of critical events is presented from multiple perspectives such as cultural, social, anthropological and organizational. Crisis communication assumes value for the strategic importance it has in the processes of orientation, definition of the situation, providing meaning and significance to the experience of crisis lived.

In addition to these, there are also other elements that contribute to supporting the indispensability of communication in crisis management. In this regard, one thinks of the need for communication aimed at organizing and coordinating the response to the impact of the crisis by the institutional and administrative agencies responsible for this task.

In this context, what emerges as relevant is the ability to be able to manage different visions and interpretations of the crisis that underlie the personal, individual and organizational perception of the system to which one belongs.

Crisis communication supports these cognitive and social processes and for these reasons can be considered a facilitator of prevention and response processes to critical events.

The in-depth analysis of these aspects with specific reference to crisis communication during the early stages of the pandemic in Italy and with a focus on the Lombardy Region is an important opportunity to better understand the contemporary and future challenges of crisis communication in hybrid and high-intensity social contexts.

Crisis Management and Crisis Communication Theories

Crisis management is a young discipline that has been systematized since the 50s and 60s of the last centuries. In fact, in psychological, sociological and anthropological terms, the practices of crisis management have been recognized since the dawn of humanity. In fact, humans have always had to relate to contexts and environments that present elements of threat and vulnerability to which they had to respond proactively, otherwise human beings would not survive.

Over the centuries, increasingly advanced, dynamic and complex societies have been formed, intervening in priority way in the forms taken by crises of various kinds and their impacts.

Crisis is a universal event, always present in human history, which is characterized by some key factors such as those identified by Quarantelli et al. (2006): threat, uncertainty, and urgency.

The threat has gone from being conceptualized as an almost exclusively physical agent, belonging to the socio-systemic context in which it was inserted, to a hybrid typology for which, given the complexity of life contexts, the threat assumes hybrid forms with high levels of interdependence and interconnection between different socio-vital environments.

In this sense, the digital or onlife dimension (Floridi, 2014) is introduced, which presents elements of synthesis belonging to both the offline and online dimensions of people’s daily lives.

In particular, the advent of new communication technologies, including the spread of social media, social networks and instant messaging apps, have allowed the development of social relationships in a hybrid form and contextualized in digital contexts, which take on both elements typical of the offline and online dimensions.

Uncertainty is the hallmark of the impact of a crisis, as with it all the certainties, stability and routine that used to be part of everyday life are questioned and changed according to the level of impact of the crisis itself.

Uncertainty is a fundamental variable in the definition of a state of crisis but also in its types of response, since crisis planning and governance are rooted in the possibility of defining a theoretical and representative framework that is as uncertain and complex as possible.

Finally, urgency is another distinctive element that intervenes in crisis management and that in general is well represented by the words of Bauman (2006a, b): “what is important is the speed not the duration.”

Time, understood as an essential variable together with that of space– context in the definition of a crisis is increasingly represented in the contemporary era as pressure, urgency and its absence.

As will be argued, one of the narratives related to the communication of the pandemic crisis in Italy focused precisely on the time pressure exerted by the impact of the crisis and the need for an effective response. This relationship was often declined in managerial and organizational vulnerability, emphasizing the lack of time and therefore the difficulty in managing the current crisis.

Urgency is well associated with the more general view of time proposed by Bauman (2006a, b), who emphasizes the nature of urgency, which is speed. The latter in the current global context is clearly evident in the light of the rapid changes and evolutions that take place, for example, in critical and conflictual scenarios.

In recent years, the concept of crisis has been defined not only in consideration of the three elements mentioned by Quarantelli et al. (2006) but also in view of the relevance that some of its peculiarly characteristics have recently assumed.

According to this perspective, two definitions of crisis can be cited, which relate to the concepts of permacrisis and polycrisis.

Permacrisis identifies crises on the basis of a time value which, as the first part of the word indicates, tends to identify a state of permanent instability and uncertainty. In 2022, permacrisis was defined by the Collins dictionary word of the year, giving this definition: “a term that perfectly embodies the dizzying sense of lurching from one unprecedented event to another, as we wonder bleakly what new horrors might be around the corner. Collins defines it as “an extended period of instability and insecurity” and that certainly rings true.”Footnote 1

In particular, this definition underlines two aspects of permacrisis, i.e. the first linked to the permanence of the state of crisis, which is perceived without a solution but a long continuum consisting of passages from crisis to crisis; the second highlights the permanence of the crisis in the daily lives of people who can come to identify the crisis as a lifestyle, as defined by Shevchenko (2009, 2015), who identified this type of perception of the crisis through a study conducted on the study of the life of Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

On the one hand, therefore, permacrisis is substantiated by a temporal nature and its perception of non-finiteness, on the other hand, the concept of polycrisis highlights other relevant aspects in the definition of critical situations.

In fact, the term polycrisis focuses more on the structure of the crisis itself and its characteristics of interconnectedness and interdependence.

The Treccani Encyclopedia defines polycrisis as “Crisis involving multiple aspects or issues”Footnote 2, Therefore, the emphasis is placed on the dimensions and various levels of a system under stress that can be affected by the impact and manifestation of a crisis.

The word polycrisis, unlike the previous permacrisis, is not a new term but as it is pointed out: “The term polycrisis was invented by the philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin in the nineties, in reference mainly to the climate crisis. It was not very successful at the time, but it was revived in 2016 by Jean-Claude Juncker, who was then president of the European Commission, who said, in reference to the many crises that Europe was experiencing at that time (from sovereign debt to migration), that the European Union risked “sleepwalking from one crisis to another, without ever waking up.”Footnote 3

The polycrisis, despite its multidimensionality, also assumes and concentrates within it the traits of a permanence of the crisis understood as a continuous passage from one crisis to another.

This perspective, given its relevance for crisis governance, is of fundamental importance because it aims at a paradigm shift from protection to defensive resilience. This is because resilient actions and responses by the affected system are eroded from a stable level of constant vulnerability.

Moreover, the concepts of permacrisis and polycrisis are not the only ones with which crisis management approaches have to deal but the definition of creeping crisis as provided by Boin et al. (2020) also emerges who define a creeping crisis as “[…] a threat to widely shared societal values or life-sustaining systems that evolves over time and space, is foreshadowed by precursor events, subject to varying degrees of political and/or societal attention, and impartially or insufficiently addressed by authorities.”

The identification of the creeping crisis and its characteristics introduces the relationship of trust between citizens and institutions, which is fundamental for effective crisis governance. Trust in a crisis management context assumes relevance for the disposition towards the acceptability of the situation and for giving an explicit and agreed cognitive definition of the situation (Lombardi, 2005), so as to be able to support the sense and significance of what is being experienced. This systematization thus proposed introduces the need for a new theorization of crisis management models, in particular along two trajectories:

This topic related to the creeping crisis has been explored by Badu et al. (2023), who identified:

Four creeping crisis management settings […] can be identified when these developmental levels (high or low) and determinants (trustworthiness and crisis communi­cation) are combined.

  1. 1.

    Controllable crisis management settings: a crisis man­agement setting where policymakers are perceived to be more trustworthy (high trust) and more successful communicators (high communication).

  2. 2.

    Uncertain crisis management settings: a crisis manage­ment setting where policymakers are perceived to be more trustworthy (high trust) but less successful com­municators (low communication).

  3. 3.

    Complex crisis management settings: a crisis manage­ment setting where policymakers are perceived as good communicators (high communication) but less trust­worthy managers (low trust).

  4. 4.

    Uncontrollable crisis management settings: a crisis management setting where policymakers are perceived as poor communicators (low communication) and untrustworthy (low trust).

  • the recognition of communication and its practices as essential methods for the management of a crisis and for its governance, in consideration of the factors of vulnerability and complexity.

Moreover, communication structures must not forget the interpretative importance of linguistic and cultural codes, to promote resilient, proactive and adaptive communication strategies and practices.

  • the consideration of new digital contexts and artificial intelligence as relational environments in which the communicative and interpretative dynamics of crises take place.

Because of these theoretical assumptions, the application of which will be seen in the analysis of the case study, it is considered useful to be able to think of a crisis management model that is digital, characterized by the acquisition of digital-soft skills for all those interested in crisis management and therefore able to compete with current challenges in an increasingly multidimensional and interconnected world.

Method

With regard to the perspective and methodological approach related to the case study of communication in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy and in the Lombardy Region, the online ethnography approach was used (Kozinets, 2010; Maretti & Fontanella 2019) and, in particular, open source for the collection of sources.

The collection of sources was supported by the choice of some keywords such as pandemic, emergency, crisis, time, response and the selection of the sources to be used was made on the basis of the criteria of relevance and adherence to the topic under study.

After the creation of the corpus of sources considered valid and adequate for analysis, they were systematized through the consideration of the narrative topics that emerged and subsequently they were interpreted according to the theoretical principles of crisis management that emerged from the scientific literature.

The Institutional Pandemic Communication in Italy

From an institutional perspective, the communication of the crisis resulting from the epidemic spread of the Covid-19 virus represented a further element of criticality and vulnerability in a national context already subjected to stress and with the presence of previous vulnerabilities such as that relating to the national health system.

As for the themes of the narratives of the communication that took place in the weeks preceding the declaration of the national lockdown, communicated on 09 March 2020, they focus on some main aspects.

The first relates to the origin of the virus, for which it has been questioned whether the agent was natural or created in a laboratory. Much discussion has arisen around the idea that the cause of the beginning of the spread of the virus could be due to an accident in a laboratory in Wuhan.

This communication, which took place not only in Italy but also at the international level, contains a first important element of reflection for the practice of crisis communication: the international context, in this specific case international relations with China, have a significant weight in the way in which individual countries communicate and represent the crisis. producing a collective imagination that feeds public opinion towards the specific theme.

In relation to this, we must not forget the image and national reputation produced towards the outside: an example in this regard is the video spread on the net of a French pizza maker intent on preparing a coronavirus pizza, underlining the Italian origin of the spread. In fact, between the end of February and the beginning of March 2020, Italy was the first European country to present a high number of rapidly rising infections.

A second aspect and recurring theme in institutional communication in the early stages of the pandemic is that of the action of containing the spread. It is at this specific moment that institutional communications relating to the health issue and the measures for the containment of the epidemic begin, not without a wide critical debate between the scientific community and government institutions, about the validity of a provision with respect to the choice of another containment measure.

In this framework, the characteristics of crisis information, which should contain clear and transparent indications with respect to the decisions to be taken and the behaviors to be adopted in a crisis situation, have been disregarded, causing in the public and in the population the effects and behaviors held the day and evening before the declaration of the national lockdown on March 9, 2020.

A third aspect, this one more characteristic of regional communications in Italy and in particular at the beginning of the pandemic in the Lombardy Region, concerns the campaign embraces a Chinese aimed at avoiding stigmatization and stereotypes related to the Asian origin of the epidemic.

This communicative way of creating in-group and out-group social dynamics has been the one pursued throughout the pandemic years, changing the narrative of exclusion and inclusion from time to time.

A fourth relevant issue in pandemic institutional communication in Italy is related to access to sources and their level of transparency.

In this regard, think of the series of DPCM– Decree of the President of the Council of Ministers classified and used as a tool for the management of the ongoing crisis, five of which were then de-classified on 06 August 2020.

However, in terms of crisis information, this has given rise to criticism and discussion among different institutional and security agencies: an element that can be read in terms of strategic vulnerability and lack of planning in the management of information and communications in critical contexts.

In this regard, the role played by the lack of updating of the national pandemic plan is undeniable, within which a fundamental pillar should be dedicated to risk and crisis communication, compensating for and evaluating all the social and sociological components that intervene in crisis communication processes and in the dynamics of trust between citizens and institutions.

Another relevant theme was the communication duality, with related regional narratives, between the national government and the Regions. A fragile element on which, however, different narratives related to risk management and the health crisis have been built, which have led to the image of a strong regionalization of the measures to be adopted with debates and clashes between some regions, the national government and some exponents of the Italian scientific community.

Finally, an underlying narrative that exploded in a manifest way with the Prime Minister’s statement on March 9, 2020, is that relating to time, its lack for crisis management and the urgency that derives from it.

Urgency is the time variable of the impact of a crisis and given its relevance to the future effects of crisis management, time pressure is a crucial aspect in emergency planning and crisis communication.

These narratives and the themes that can be traced back to them have profoundly marked the relations between the population and institutional agencies, giving rise in the continuation of the epidemic spread to conspiracy theories, circulation of false information, disinformation, unverified communication, supporting the phenomena of conflict and violence that then occurred in the following months and years.

Crisis Management and Crisis Communication: Findings from the Italian Case

Since the early stages of the management of the pandemic crisis in Italy and its institutional communication, some critical factors have been emerging (Lucini, 2020; 2021) that are directly related to the to-down model of crisis management adopted, effectively excluding the opening to bottom-up management models aimed at understanding and considering socio-cultural variables in crisis management, Such as the role of trust in institutions and the perceptions coming from the population.

This has also been highlighted by (Venuleo et al., 2022):“Recent studies, analysing governments’ communication about the COVID-19 emergency, show that in Italy, as in many other countries, it has been far from all the best practices recommended for risk communication in a health crisis– e.g., ensuring consistent communication over time, keeping instructions clear and actionable to ensure public compliance, avoiding the use of fear; moving away from orthodox top-down communication approaches, towards bottom-up tailored risk communication that accounts for public values, perceptions and situations.[...]" (Warren & Lofstedt, 2021; Du et al., 2020; Williams et al., 2020).”

In particular, the topic of trust is one of the four pillars of crisis management according to Ruiu (2020): “Four main forces might affect the communication of a crisis related to its perception, process and metabolization of information, tendency to put greater attention on losses than gains, and trust-building processes (Covello et al., 2001; Glik, 2007).”

The trust process to be implemented, however, requires time, attention to the cultural specificities of the population and the perceptions coming from different social groups.

On the other hand, the relationship that has been created between citizens and institutions, with reference to communication in the early stages of the pandemic spread, has been an underestimation of both what people already knew (or did not know) (Lombardi, 2005; Lucini, 2014) and cognitive and informational needs (Lombardi, 2005) to manage the current emergency and its possible evolution from a cognitive point of view. Venuleo et al. (2022) underline this dynamic well: “A similar underestimation of citizens’ perspectives is recognizable in the politicians’ approach to crisis management. The relationship between institutions and citizens has often been configured as a relationship between an expert “who knows” what the problem is, who knows how to deal rationally and logically with it, and a user-community, passive, in need of care or explanations, who “do not know”, and who can do nothing but trust (Pleyers, 2020; Venuleo, 2022; Wester, 2011)”, the same authors also underline that: “Accordingly, the importance of adopting ordinary people’s perspective and thus valorising their accounts of the institutional management as “data that count” lies in acknowledging their impact on the ways citizens experience, evaluate, cope, and react to the actions planned to respond to “their needs.”(Venuleo et al., 2022).

In fact, it is evident that opposing groups are being created that come to compete for knowledge of a situation of uncertainty and instability, without this relationship being based on mutual trust and credibility.

The theory of crisis management, on the other hand, indicates very clearly how trust and its declination in the field of communication are essential for decision-making processes, which thus allow them to be based on a definition and interpretation of risk and crisis that is as negotiated and shared as possible.

According to the perspective highlighted, such an approach leads to the conceptualization of the population as a victim who must be saved, in the recognition of its passive state or of those who have to carry out an order, perhaps not understood or not contextualized in a cognitive framework oriented to the current crisis: “The call to have faith then becomes a reference to a relationship that is not simply asymmetric but creates passivity (Freda, 2008)” (Venuleo et al., 2022).

In this case, rather than proactivity and active resilience, it is a crystallized institutional resilience (Lucini, 2020; 2021), then brought back to its state of push for action and adaptive response to the emergency, in that slogan “everything will be fine” that raged shortly after the announcement of the national lockdown.

The slogan, conceived by a citizen, cannot, however, be counted among the institutional communication of the health crisis, for which instead there is continuous information on its uncertainty and widespread fear at the national level. In this regard, as Ruiu (2020) points out: “[…] the spread of panic is one of the most frequent causes of failure of crisis communication, and can result from high degrees of uncertainty surrounding an unknown threat (Frewer et al., 2003), incapacity of leaders to channel people fears into specific actions, speculation and multiple contrasting messages sent to the public (Covello et al., 2001; Robinson & Newstetter, 2003), lack of transparency and lack of trust and credible claim-makers (Fessenden-Raden et al., 1987; Peters et al., 1997; Renn & Levine, 1991; Reynolds, 2005).”

In fact, the task of effective crisis communication planning is precisely to support cognitive frameworks and positive approaches to responding to the critical event, not to spread panic based on the communication of information that is often partial or requires more time for their confirmation. The need in these contexts is in fact to manage and keep feelings of fear and indeterminacy under control: “[…] This means that when an unexpected health crisis occurs, governments, scientists and the media deal with uncertainty (Lofstedt, 2006), public fear, and rely upon reciprocal support/coordination (Reynolds & Seeger, 2005).” Ruiu (2020).

Finally, the critical issues that emerged in terms of institutional communication both at national level and in the Lombardi Region in the early stages of the epidemic spread clearly mark the fact that these vulnerabilities can be traced back to the broader approach of crisis management and risk planning that has been decided to adopt.

Such a perspective must necessarily be confronted with the different levels of analysis and risk assessment present among citizens and institutions: “Despite the different focus made pertinent by the narratives, the perceived disparity emerged between what has been said and done by politicians and what citizens expect and need. The second dimension highlights the variability and, in some respects, the conflictual questions addressed to the government: the request is, on the one hand, to find immediate responses to the health emergency, on the other hand, to overcome an emergency-based approach to the problems and to invest efforts and competence to make the social world a better place to live, learning from the past and making the future a thinkable object.” (Venuleo et al., 2022).

This vulnerability to different demands for crisis management also relates to the institutional organizational context under stress, which is confronted with its own skills and resources in the management of critical events from different profiles: organizational, communication, logistical, evaluation (Cleveland, 2015).

Another fundamental element that emerges from the analysis conducted is the need to also consider the relationship not only in communicative terms but also in operational terms between the public and private sectors.

In this regard, the studies conducted by Signorelli et al. (2024) and Lovari and Ducci (2021) highlight good practices of collaboration and coordination between the public and private sectors. This relationship, which is not always structured and recognised within the current models of crisis management, has proven to be a crucial factor in crisis management and emergency response with a focus on the response and preparedness phases.

In particular, the assessment of institutional crisis communication in the early stages of the pandemic in Italy is well summarized in the words of Venuleo et al. (2022): “Based on our analysis of the Italians’ narratives, media communication appears confusing, unclear, even inconsistent and contradictory (e.g., the fear solicited by the continuous updating of the death toll and the slogan ‘everything will be all right’, felt to be an empty promise, denying the complexity of the crisis to be managed).”

The management of Italian institutional communication in the early stages of the pandemic was mainly focused on on-demand information needs, on a temporal fragmentation of communication that differed from region to region and from region to national government. Specifically, there was a lack of prior knowledge not only of the possible cultural perceptions of a health emergency, also in consideration of the historical aspects involving the interpretations of critical events, but also of the most effective communication methods in consideration of the type of event and the socio-cultural characteristics of the population identified as the target of the communication of the current crisis.

Finally, as Abboodi et al. (2023) report: “Various studies emphasise that organisations still do not fully understand how to communicate crisis information using Social Media.” (Veil et al., 2011; Eriksson, 2012; Ki & Nekmat, 2014).

This has emerged explicitly if we analyze the information conveyed through the different institutional accounts and those of the various government representatives and politicians. In this regard, it emerges that the approach to emergency and crisis communication differs from the consolidated principles of crisis management and instead introduces a necessary reflection on the vulnerability generated by an ineffective management of social networks in the event of a crisis.

In this regard, it should not be forgotten that in Italy an initial reflection on the role of social networks and social media in emergencies and crises was launched with the Conference of the Civil Protection Department in November 2013 entitled: Civil Protection and social media: communicating the risk and the risk of communicating.Footnote 4

As can be seen from the publication of the Conference Footnote 5, among the experts and scholars on the subject, there was an awareness, given the very characteristics of media platforms and the new communication landscape, that the use of social media was a crucial element for the management of future crises contextualized in an increasingly digital and complex world.

This awareness, however, has not translated into skills and application of founding principles of crisis communication and more generally of crisis management, as well reported by the effects and communication practices of disinformation, infodemic and the spread of fake news that have been increasing over the pandemic years.

Conclusion: Toward a Digital Crisis Communication Pattern

The analysis of the institutional communication of the pandemic crisis in Italy and of the Lombardy Region as the first region in which the epidemic manifested itself have put in place some key factors for the development of an approach to crisis management and crisis communication that can be recognized in its digital dimension.

The first need that emerges after the study conducted is that of a reformulation of the theoretical model of crisis management, of crisis and risk communication that takes into due consideration the complexity and interconnections of new social systems and how these translate into contemporary digital communication ecosystems, in which relational dynamics are increasingly structured, communication and social issues of millions of people.

A new pattern of crisis communication should fundamentally consider three pillars for its implementation.

The concerns the digital component in which people’s lives are increasingly concretized and which represents a synthesis of the communicative and relational elements present in the two traditional dimensions of contemporary living, namely offline and online. The consideration of the new sociality expressed by the term onlife (Floridi, 2014) implies a different way of planning the crisis and as many different practices of crisis communication, without however forgetting the key principles underlined by Ruiu (2020): “[…] the literature highlights that crisis-communication (Seeger et al., 1998, 2001) must be “timely, accurate, direct, and […] give people hope” (Glik, 2007). […]”.

Such an approach highlights the need to manage the multidimensionality of communication and digital communication environments and ecosystems, posing the question of where and how to place crisis communication by organizational systems such as governments and public administrations.

Moreover, the examples of partnerships between, above all, the public and private health sector (Signorelli et al., 2024) with reference to the Lombardy Region during the Covid-19 pandemic showed the need to work on different plans for the promotion of collaboration between institutions in all phases of crisis, emergency and risk management, such as the operational, strategic and communication plans that can be activated for collaboration between institutions from different sectors.

This means equipping oneself with a model and a communication structure negotiated in meanings and shared in organizational practices so that institutional communication of the crisis, as it was with the pandemic in Italy, is not a source among sources but is the accredited and reliable source that is needed to implement an effective and adequate crisis management for the crisis we are experiencing.

The digital context understood in terms of opportunities for relationships and sharing the information framework in the event of risk and crisis thus becomes a central element with a fundamental role in rethinking crisis management practices. Similarly, there are challenges related to the possibility of using technologies and with regard to the phenomena of fake news and infodemics that were present exponentially during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Moreover, according to this perspective, it means distinguishing between institutional communications with reference to the information and practical management of the current crisis and the discourses and narratives that arise around the crisis as collateral issues with respect to the current crisis (Lombardi, 2005). In this case, for the entire duration of the pandemic in Italy, it was possible to notice a continuous overlap of the two levels of communication, so much so that it could be argued that the communicated crisis was more of a political element and less of a communication linked to the management practices of a critical event.

A second aspect is directly related to the previous one and requires some considerations in order to implement a new approach to digital crisis management.

First of all, there is a need for specific training of communication professionals who, in the various areas and institutional levels, are able to manage and coordinate the flow of information aimed at managing a crisis. In this regard, communication plans, as well as emergency plans, should be constantly updated in relation to both new communication technologies and the challenges they pose and communication tools that innovate and change very quickly.

For example, a necessary reflection to be included in a digital model of crisis management and communication concerns the development of communication tools based on artificial intelligence.

This innovative drive, however, must not forget the founding principles of crisis communication, namely those of communication ethics.

A third fundamental element concerns the need to spread a culture of crisis media education, for which complex digital communication systems can be managed in the light of skills acquired by recognizing the role of (social) media in communication, including institutional communication, of a crisis.

In this way, it will be possible to implement a crisis management that takes into account the various components of society and above all the technological and cultural changes that are taking place and that is based on the development of those “21st-century skills” identified by Gewertz (2007) as: “critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication, information literacy, media literacy, technology literacy, flexibility, leadership, initiative, productivity, social skills.”

In conclusion, these are the elements that emerged as essential to innovate the crisis communication approach in the light of current societies and the need for digital crisis management where the new digital dimension is included for the understanding of relational dynamics and communication practices.

In recent years, the case of the pandemic has shown how crisis management in Italy is at a turning point to decide the new planning dimension to be explored and as Venuleo et al. (2022) argue: “The second dimension of meaning represents the dialectic of two different criteria adopted to evaluate crisis management by the Institutions: one focused on the short term (response to the emergency); the other on the long term (kind of investment in the future).”

Italian experiences show that there is a need to decide for the second option proposed by Venuleo et al. (2022), i.e. to promote a vision of the future of crisis management with a particular focus on crisis communication in digital communication and relationship ecosystems, to plan and manage future crises more effectively.