The Alphabet We Built Our Brand On

I loved the look of Florence's Santa Maria Novella train station's lettering for years before I understood any of what it was. I'd stop on the platform for it - the width of the capitals, the way the numerals on the departure board sit slightly heavier than they need to - long before I ever thought to ask where that alphabet came from, or why Italy kept producing letterforms with that much intention behind them. The meaning came later. The obsession with the shape came first, and it came honestly, the way most obsessions do: I just liked how it looked, for years, before I liked knowing why.

It turns out Santa Maria Novella wasn't a one-off. Italy has produced at least three genuinely different ideas of what a letter should look like, roughly two and a half centuries apart, and I don't think it's an accident that each one arrived at a hinge point in how the country saw itself.

The first is Venetian. In 1501, a type-cutter named Francesco Griffo, working for the printer Aldus Manutius, cut the first italic - sloped, condensed, based on the quick chancery handwriting of humanist scribes rather than the formal hand of a monastery scriptorium. Manutius wanted books small enough to fit in a coat pocket, so a scholar could carry a Virgil the way you'd carry a letter from a friend. The italic isn't decorative. It's what portability looks like when someone bothers to make it beautiful.

The second is Parma, nearly three hundred years later. Giambattista Bodoni, running the Duke's royal press, pushed the contrast between a letter's thick and thin strokes as far as metal-casting would allow, until the serif nearly disappeared into a hairline. Bodoni isn't warm. It's precise in a way that still reads as confidence, which is presumably why half of fashion's mastheads still reach for something in its family whenever they want to look expensive without saying so.

The third is Florence, 1935. Santa Maria Novella station - die-cut lead letters over the platforms, hand-painted departure boards, numerals cut with a severity that took me years to place before I read what the station actually was. Designed by the Gruppo Toscano under Giovanni Michelucci, it's one of the purest surviving expressions of Italian Rationalism, the polite architectural term for a movement that was, with total sincerity, styling the visual language of Fascism. The letters were built to look like the future a regime wanted - order made to look inevitable.

Three fonts, three ideas of what Italy was trying to be: portable and humane, precise and confident, orderly and absolute. None of them were designed as decoration. Each was an argument, made in metal, about what a good letter should tell a stranger reading it.

Three fonts, three ideas of what Italy was trying to be: portable and humane, precise and confident, orderly and absolute. None of them were designed as decoration. Each was an argument, made in metal, about what a good letter should tell a stranger reading it.

I copied the third one - not the politics, the proportions - into the mark that has sat on The Leopard since the beginning. I still think about that: whether taking a shape and leaving its history at the door is a defensible thing to do, or just a comfortable one. I don't think the shape is guilty of what commissioned it. I do think it's worth knowing, every time you use a letter someone else cut with a purpose, whose purpose it originally was.