Greeting card: Venezia
Greeting card: Venezia
Fratelli Bonvini
Carlo Scarpa was one of the great Venetian architects of the twentieth century - a designer whose work was always about how a building meets a city of water, and about the material of every joint, edge and floor. In the early 1960s he rebuilt the ground floor of the Palazzo Querini Stampalia, the historic foundation just off Campo Santa Maria Formosa. The floor he laid there is a study in itself: panels of inlaid stone in pink against black, set out with the rigour of a drawing.
The lettering on this card is drawn from those floor patterns. The type studio Cabaret Typographie has used Scarpa's geometric inlays as the bones of an alphabet, and printed it in the same pink and black - the colours of the polychrome marbles that have lined Venice for centuries.
A quarter-page card with envelope. Blank inside, for your own words.
Exclusive to Australia.
Couldn't load pickup availability
Product information
Greeting card with envelope
11 x 16.5cm
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.
