Augusta is an all-caps inline geometric typeface of rather complex construction. Each character has a solid and a shaded side, the latter consisting of a grid of thin parallel lines. It is a prime example of modernist type design, albeit with some letterforms with Art Nouveau traits (see for instance B, F and an alternate round E which can be activated via OpenType features); in fact, Art Nouveau types lasted much longer in Italy than elsewhere and they were still fashionable in the late 1930s.
AM Augusta
Augusta was a metal type produced by the Fonderia Tipografica Meridionale Armando De Luca (Naples), a family-run type foundry about which very little information is available. It was founded in 1896 and ceased activity in the 1970s or early 1980s, when the De Luca family switched to the manufacture of printing inks. Their greatest success seems to have been Napoli, a sanserif very similar to Schriftguss’s Super-Grotesk.
Courtesy Gaetano Grizzanti Archive
Released in six sizes, from 20 to 72 points, Augusta shares a family likeness with some German inline typefaces which were popular in the late 1920s. Nonetheless, as far as we can tell, Augusta is an original design.
In the words of the designer Riccardo Olocco, the AM Augusta digital revival ‘is faithful to the original even though many small details have been improved to make the grid construction of the letters consistent throughout the character set. In conformity with modern taste, letter spacing has also been improved and is now much tighter than the original. Some figures have been modified, because their original shapes did not fit well with the others’.
Courtesy Luca Lattuga
Round E (SS 01)
