Letizia Pitigliani’s bold illustration promotes the 1977 New York Harbor Festival, a three-day event over the July 4th holiday that had been established during the bicentennial festivities the previous year with an event called Operation Sail. She shows the bows of the great ocean liners—the Doric, the Statendam, the Oceanic, the Queen Elizabeth II, the Cunard Princess, and the Kazakhstan—fanned out in the harbor against the city skyline, apparently heading straight for the viewer. Pitigliani was born in Rome, where she trained at the Academy of Fine Arts, later moving to New York. Among her many paintings of her adopted city was the one printed in her first poster, Operation Sail: Parade of Tall Ships, produced the year before this one in celebration of the bicentennial.