Tuscan Letters.

Another deep dive into an obscure region of typography, With hollow feet and harlequin hats: Tuscan letters, a prank of lapidary origin? (Second part):

Tere Schultz delivers a new literary and typographic divertimento for passionate readers. This time she follows one of her personal fixations: the Tuscan letters. Those ornamental objects, delicate or extravagant, that inhabit streets and typographic catalogs of all times, without losing an iota of expressive force. The product of decorative ingenuity, Tuscan vernaculars dress the street signs of Mexico as much as the stained glass windows of Paris, the ‘fileteado porteño’ of Buenos Aires signs or the hulls of fishing boats in the Amazon waters. However, this decorative ubiquity, notorious and implausible, alarms many. Fortunately, like a healing balm, Schultz will deploy here her original hypothesis, suspiciously unexplored, of how the Tuscan style would have been born from a mischievous interpretation of the stone inscriptions (wrongly) called lapidary. Although perhaps here the term ‘lapidary’ is appropriate, since the idea caught the author strolling through a cemetery. (Warning: sensitive material. Agnostic typographers and designers of little faith, please refrain).

Here’s a definition:

Basically, a typeface is considered Tuscan when its serifs are bi- or tri-furcated (sometimes with a greater number of extensions) to achieve a certain degree of fantasy or ornamentation. The examples are infinite since, apart from the terminals, all the other elements of the anatomy of a letter can vary: the strokes contrast, the ratio of proportions, the absence / presence of diamonds and other elements within the strokes, shadows, textures and other external additions.

And here’s a discussion of the name:

No one knows for sure the origin of the term Tuscan in typography. Nicolete Gray, a passionate researcher of decorative lettering, suggests that it may have been invented by Victorian type founders, there being no historical trace of such a designation [1]. Remember that Tuscan, the cultured and literary language of Alighieri, Boccaccio and Petrarch, is the one that eventually prevailed over the other dialects of northern Italy, and it is therefore likely that ‘Tuscan’ was a generic name given to everything that was believed to come from that region. [2]

On the other hand, Tuscan is only a name. We do not know with historical rigour whether it is legitimate to call it Tuscan or whether the style would have been born in Tuscany, although we could well imagine that, northern Italy having been for so long the fundamental source of all artistic novelty, in the eyes of the rest of the continent, it is likely that any innovation devoid of name or place of origin would be called Italian or Tuscan. We already know that all roads lead to Rome (or Florence) and that the traces of the Roman Empire throughout its territory are still warm.

If that sounds appealing, click on through for much more, with glorious illustrations and (in the second part) examples localized to Paris, Mexico, Buenos Aires, and Brazil; having been for a while a porteño myself, I will quote that section:

Caminito, the famous tourist promenade in the La Boca neighborhood, south of the city of Buenos Aires, adopted what is called fileteado porteño, a technique that exists in other popular cultures but here with very own characteristics. There is also a series of historical signs in the mosaic technique, of great subtlety, to recall significant figures of the culture.

The images make me intensely nostalgic. And the word fileteado is “From Spanish fileteado, ultimately from Latin filum (‘thread’), referring to fine painted lines.”