Marco Balich, the creative mind behind the ceremony, spoke of his ambition to blend traditional Alpine imagery with Milanese modernity to showcase “Italian excellence”. In practice, it was hard to see the alchemy. What we saw was a generic stitching-together of national dolce vita stereotypes that did nothing to showcase the pluralistic voices defining the country’s shifting cultural frontiers. Even the Tunisian-Italian rapper Ghali, arguably the most vital artist on the bill, felt like a lonely representative of a multicultural Milan the organisers didn’t actually want to engage with. No wonder he appeared so unenthused in his performance. This was painting by numbers: a manufactured image that had little to do with the social realities of Italy.