Capitolium was designed in 1998 at the request of the Agenzia romana per la preparatione del Giubileo for the Jubilee of the Roman Catholic Church in 2000. This type design was the central part of the project for a wayfinding and information system to guide pilgrims and tourists through Rome. Capitolium also continues Rome’s almost uninterrupted two-thousand-year-old tradition of public lettering . It is a modern typeface for the twenty-first century and strongly related to the traditions of Rome.
Soon after the completion of this project Unger began contemplating the possibility of bringing the atmosphere of this design to newspapers. Though Capitolium works well in most modern production processes and also on screens, it is too fragile for newsprint. For newspapers sturdier shapes were required as well as more characters to a line of text, and Capitolium News has a bigger x-height than Capitolium. Capitolium News is a thoroughly modern newsface, with classic letterforms linked to a strong tradition. As is possible with most of Unger’s type designs, Capitolium News can be condensed and expanded without any harm to the letterforms.
The update to this beautiful font family, Capitolium 2, includes the addition of over 250 glyphs featuring full Latin A language support, new ligatures, 4 sets of numerals, arbitrary fractions and superiors/inferiors. Furthermore, kerning was added and fine tuned for better performance.
To find out what's new in Capitolium 2 please download the type specimen.