Greeting card: Milano
Greeting card: Milano
Fratelli Bonvini
In the 1930s, the Fausto Gallico foundry in Milan cast a typographic frieze called Gloria - a set of small geometric ornaments meant for decorative borders, the squares and triangles and circles a typesetter would arrange around a heading. It has been in the Fratelli Bonvini archive ever since.
For this card, the type studio Cabaret Typographie digitised those pieces and used them to spell MILANO across the page, with a band of the frieze running as a border in its original role.
The letters are not type. They are the ornament, made to do the work of letters. A holiday card from the city where the frieze was cast.
Exclusive to Australia.
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Product information
Greeting card with envelope
21 x 18cm
About Fratelli Bonvini
There is a stationery shop on Via Tagliamento in Milan where the colours on the walls, the cabinets, and the wooden drawers are the ones installed in 1909. Fratelli Bonvini has been a working shop that entire time, and it looks it - not restored to look old, but old, continuously, without a break.
Costante Bonvini opened it that year. He had noticed that people in the district were travelling kilometres for paper and ink, so he opened a stationery shop and brought his sister Luigia in to run it with him. Before long it was a printworks as well: Bonvini designed and printed for an industrial quarter that was expanding fast - letterhead, posters, wine labels, the work a whole neighbourhood needed done. Three presses carried it, among them a platen press from the nineteenth century.
By 2011 the shop had passed out of the family, and it was close to closing for good. In 2014 a group of printers and typographers took it on - not to modernise it, but to keep it exactly as it was. Every fixture stayed. The presses still run.
What Bonvini makes now is letterpress: artworks, cards, notebooks, and pencils, printed in that same room, on those same machines, by people who took the place on precisely because it had not changed.
Fratelli Bonvini is exclusive to Australia at The Leopard.
