Manifesti della Festa popolare di S.Egidio Abate, Tolfa
This selection of five posters documents over sixty years of celebrations in honor of Sant'Egidio Abate, patron saint of Tolfa, a small hilltop town north of Rome. Printed between 1898 and 1958, these artifacts reveal not only the evolution of a local religious festival but also the social, cultural, and graphic transformations of a small Italian community from the 19th century to the postwar period.
All the posters are almost entirely typographical. Among them, the 1898 poster is of particular historical and graphic importance. As the earliest known example of the series, it retains the visual language of late-19th-century provincial printing.
Note the "C" s, which resemble horseshoes.
The 1912 poster marks a significant shift. An illustration of Tolfa appears prominently at the head of the composition, transforming the poster into a vehicle of local identity as well as information. It also records the arrival of new forms of mass media: a “Grandioso Spettacolo Cinematografico” featuring scenes from the Italo-Turkish War, demonstrating how the patronal festival became a channel through which national events and technological novelties reached a rural audience.
The postwar posters of 1953 and 1958 reflect a different social landscape. Produced under the auspices of organizations such as ENAL and the municipal workers’ club, they adopt a cleaner and more modern typographic language, characterized by large sans-serif headlines and greater visual clarity. While traditional elements remain—horse races, processions, fireworks, and aerostatic balloons—the programs expand to include athletic competitions, school award ceremonies, variety shows, radio performers, poetry contests, and football tournaments. Witness of social change is the dramatic growth of lottery prizes, from 400 lire in 1898 to 100,000 lire and even a television set in 1958, mirrors the economic and cultural changes of twentieth-century Italy.
Particularly significant is the fact that, despite the long time span documented and the succession of major innovations in printing and graphic design, like chromolithography or photocomposition, these posters continued to be produced almost exclusively using movable type letterpress composition. This persistence reveals a marked resistance to change and a desire to preserve established forms of expression, shaped both by the technical resources available to local print shops and by the symbolic value of tradition. In this sense, the series provides an exemplary case of how the graphic culture of popular festivals often privileged continuity and recognizability over the adoption of more contemporary visual languages.
Based on a suggestion by Luca Lattuga, the Nebiolo Sample Book was consulted to identify possible matches for the typefaces used in the first poster analyzed. Through visual comparison, one of the typefaces employed for the text appears to closely resemble the EGIZIANO – SERIE 302 typeface included in the sample book. Similarly, the glyph beneath the title seems to recall the FUSELLO IN MATERIALE N. 41 ornament found in the same collection.
These observations are based solely on visual comparison and do not provide conclusive evidence regarding the typefaces or ornaments actually used in the original poster. They should therefore be regarded as preliminary hypotheses, derived from the similarities identified, which could be further investigated through additional research and verification.
