Florian Brożek

This design had its origin in my fascination with two things: the history of Venetian typography & printing, as well as the history of the city itself. When I look at a printed page from the workshop of Aldus Manutius, Nicholas Jenson, or the da Spira brothers, all eminent citizens and typographers of Venice past, I cannot help but see the signs of a riddle—no matter what the actual content, be it a page of Virgil or something else, I see first the marks on the lid of a Venetian puzzle-box. Somehow the same sense of mystery that is summoned by the texture of the city, permeates the texture of those early signs, and both one and the other seem to me an asylum for secrecy and intrigue. It is a fact that, while the rest of sixteenth-century Europe was burning witches with abandon, Venice was letting them off with a mere public flogging. And in recognition of this near-tolerance for practitioners of the inexplicable, this typeface is named Strega (Italian for “witch”).

The finished design, and the inspiration for it, became the foundation for a book project.