Ultras Liberi: the stands font The fight with the police and the graffiti, passing through SS Lazio and LIBERATO

The Ultras Liberi font has a certain familiarity more or less in everyone memory. Even if you do not attend the stadium stands by preparing banners against the police, surely you will have seen it on some wall in your city.

That of Ultras Liberi, or Fasciofont as it is known by many, is not only a graphic story, but as suggested by the name, a detail of the narration of a precise Italian historical era, which favored the survival of extremist subcultures and ideologies, all now widely diffused in the stadiums.

From the student demonstrations, this character has found its stage in the stands, in which the messages launched sound like splits and categorical accusations, to which graphically a square or bold must be associated. The same effect could not be elicited by a graceful or italic font. Even us, writing in chats and wanting to highlight a concept, we use Caps Lock, just because reading is not just a mechanical practice, but above all a graphic, photographic and perceptive fact.

Rather physiologically that it was the stadiums that collected the legacy of Fasciofont, since they - with due proportions - were the last outpost of militant and by nature aggressive groups born during the Fascist period in Italy. Many fans have recovered the typical symbols and choruses of those years, linking more and more the relationship between the ideas of the right and the organized support. According to what emerges from the report of the National Observatory on Sport Manifestations (Onms), among the 328 active groups, 151 are politically oriented: 40 from the extreme right, 45 from the right, 33 from the left and 21 from the radical left. The right-wing fans, however, are groups determined, at least politically, more than the left-wing supporters, thanks to online communication, slogans, and meetings on current issues. But for politicized it means not only the display of a banner or the singing of some choir. In some lands, football and politics are intertwined, the heads are bent and the throwers tighten ties or are part of the ranks of parties and criminal movements.

In addition to Lazio, other fans more or less openly lined up on the right are those of Hellas Verona, Drughi Juventini, the Irriducibili of Inter Milan, AS Roma's Boys and Youth groups and even the Ultras of AC Milan, for the past 25 years since left-wing ideas to others more in line with recent corporate history.

An article written by Valerio Mattioli on Vice, Ultras Liberi is described how

"font with a geometric layout, those fonts that are the morphology of the letter modified by geometric, modular shapes. Other examples of the same family are the Avantgarde and the Futura (Supreme's to be clear)".

Although the name can easily make you think otherwise, the story of this character does not start on the curve at the San Siro, at the Olimpico in Rome or at the Allianz Stadium, and does not even have an origin linked to a leading art. If in fact the Helvetica font - that of the Jeep logo, The North Face, Nestlè and Microsoft - comes from the great Swiss printing school, a descendant of the geometric rigor of the Bauhaus, Ultras Liberi has a more popular origin. Crossing some variations in the figures and form, this font has kept its popular aspect, in some ways still calligraphic, linked to the gesture and to the set of values ​​of which it is the medium since its origins.

The name was officially registered on the main font platforms in 2008, by The Maccio, the character was known as Fasciofont. Its roots, in fact, refer to the fascist and neo-fascist journalism, as despicable as it is florid and original from the creative point of view.

Ultras Liberi has some differences with respect to Fasciofont, less proportionate and bolder, but still tied to a fringe of the extreme right spread also in France under the name of Ordre Nouveau. It was born just beyond the Alps and from the militant youth movement Ordre Nouveau, in which Jack Marchal, inventor of Black Rat, Mickey Mouse's neo-fascist alter ego collaborated for the graphic communication.

The inspiration also refers to the psychedelic fonts typical of the '60s disco nights, and from there it evolved into many variations. The musical cultures of those years broke away from social conformism also through a more libertine approach towards altering substances such as LSD, evidenced by songs like Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds or by cult films like Dannis Hopper's Easy Rider. The world distorted by hallucinations has created artistic currents and pictorial techniques such as that of the Tie Dye, also influencing typography, altering and distorting the proportions of some fonts. From propaganda tools, they became characters of a new youthful attitude, which resumed independence with respect to previous generations that had led, as in the case of the United States, to conflicts such as the Vietnam War.

Stylistically Ultras Liberi could derive from characters born long before the 1960s, and in particular from the refined ones of Art Deco, conceived with the purely decorative purpose inspired by the complexity of natural and spontaneous forms.

The Ultras world explains its presence through the voice and the written word, to attest to territoriality that is not by chance more marked in smaller stadiums, or in cities where there is a strong urban rivalry. For this reason, the most memorable banners of teasing in recent years have appeared in Rome, and less in Turin or Milan, in which rivalries between the supporters maintain rather quiet levels.