CARATTERI FUSI – L’A
Partnerships are numerous: “We work with an association that is involved in transhumance, for which we have created some information panels, but also with L’Aquila Calcio, which today plays in the Eccellenza football championship and is a club run by the fans,” says Antonio (in 2001, L’Aquila was winter champion in the Serie C1 and that moment was celebrated with a T-shirt that reproduces the related Teletext page).
L'Aquila Calcio
“I designed the T-shirts to celebrate the promotion of L’Aquila Calcio in the Eccellenza league, but the 2019-2020 championship was cut short due to Covid and so they were never used in a match,” says Antonio Fruci, showing a football uniform.
In the spring of 2020, after the stop imposed on football championships by the emergency, the fans association that runs the football team decided to auction the shirts to raise funds to be donated to the Bergamo section of the Italian Alpine Association, for the purchase of medical equipment to be used in relation with the Covid emergency. More than € 6,000 were collected”.
When Antonio enrolled in ReStartApp in 2015, the elleapostrofoa pilot project was already underway and the brand was beginning to be known in the city. The experience with Fondazione Garrone, however, was vital – explains the young entrepreneur – to make a quality leap forward: “Caratteri Fusi, which beforehand was just my freelance business, has now become a company. Today, Stefania and I are increasingly focused on the ‘L’A’ project”, explains Antonio.
Nowadays, L’Aquila is his open-air workshop, a place where to create and experiment with “anything that comes to mind”. The project will soon involve other cities too. The first one will be Perugia: the city’s underground map, PeruGimo, has already been designed. “We have chosen Perugia because it is larger than L’Aquila, is full of students, and is alive with cultural and social ferment. Because of Covid, however, we no longer have outlets in the Umbrian capital, as there too we had chosen to begin with pubs” says Antonio
In the meantime, however, in response to the pandemic crisis, elleapostrofoa has launched its L’A shop and developed a range of other Abruzzo-inspired products: the ‘Big Stone’ line, for example, is entirely dedicated to the Gran Sasso (T-shirts, sweatshirts, caps). The symbol mountain of the Abruzzo Apennines is also the reference behind ‘2912’ (2912 is the height of the Corno Grande, the highest point of the Gran Sasso), a T-shirt depicting the massif’s silhouette “which, seen from the Teramo side, looks like a woman’s profile, with the sea becoming the woman’s hair” explains Antonio. A T-shirt that, for him, is a tale of love for his land.
