Greeting card: Milano (Albergo Diurno Venezia)
Greeting card: Milano (Albergo Diurno Venezia)
Fratelli Bonvini
Beneath Piazza Oberdan in Milan, in the Porta Venezia quarter, there is an underground service hall called the Albergo Diurno Venezia - a "day hotel," built between 1923 and 1926 for travellers passing through the city. It had a spa, public baths, a barber shop, a nail salon: everything you might need on a long stop between trains. The architect Piero Portaluppi gave it tiled walls, decorated panels, and lettering in the spare, geometric register of high Milanese Art Deco.
The lettering on this card is taken from there. The type studio Cabaret Typographie has drawn its alphabet from the wall coverings and tiles of the Albergo Diurno and used it to compose a small homage to the city the building belongs to.
A quarter-page card with envelope. Blank inside, for your own words.
Exclusive to Australia.
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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.
