AUCHENTALLER was inspired by a travel poster by Josef Maria Auchentaller in 1906. To our knowledge, it was never cast in type. Grado lies on the northern Adriatic, between Venice and Trieste. At one time the port for the important Roman town of Aquileia. With the decline of the Roman Empire, the upper Adriatic region came under the rule of the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, the Byzantines, the Lombards, the Franks, the Germans, the Venetians and finally, in 1796, the Austrian Hapsburgs. So it remained until the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1919, following World War I, when the seaport of Trieste was awarded to Italy. With Trieste came Montefalcone, Aquileia and Grado. The area was marked by years of political tension between Italy and Jugoslavia, exemplified by the d'Annunzio expedition to capture Fuime (Rijeka)in September, 1919. Some basic discussion of the period from 1919 to 1939 may be found in Seton-Watson's EASTERN EUROPE BETWEEN THE WARS (Cambridge 1945) and Rothschild's EAST CENTRAL EUROPE BETWEEN THE TWO WORLD WARS (Seattle 1974). In 1965 I was traveling by train from Venice to Vienna. Crossing the Alps, the train stopped for customs inspection at the rural Italian-Austrian border, just above Slovenia. We were warned not to get off the train because there were still shooting skirmishes in the area. Through all this, Grado remained literally an island of tranquility, connected to the mainland by a only causeway and lines on a map.
Auchentaller not only painted the beach scene at Grado, he moved there, living out the rest of his life in this comfortable little island town. His travel illustration contains the text from which the design of our font AUCHENTALLER is drawn. The text translates: SEASIDE RESORT : GRADO / AUSTRIAN COASTAL LAND. Please see our gallery images to see a map locating Grado, as well as Auchentaller's painting of the resort.
AUCHENTALLER is a monoline all-cap font, light and open in design , with a lot of typically art nouveau letter forms. Included in our font are a number of ligatures: 137=LA, 167=LO, 175=PA, 177=TA, 181=TE and 190=WA. AS is frequently seen in designs by German speakers, the umlaut is embedded in the O & U below the tops of the letters. This approach led to two whimsies: a happy umlauted O at 172 and a sad umlauted U at 188. This font has a clean, crisp look that is very appealing and very distinctive.
This font is available at MyFonts.com
