Through anecdotes and notes, Fabio De Luca guides us into the creative world of Francesca Biasetton in this foreword to The pencil is under the table, the volume dedicated to the notebooks of the calligrapher, illustrator, and performance artist. In this monograph, enriched by the author’s hand-drawn intervention on each cover, every copy becomes a small visual treasure to leaf through, full of talent, curiosity, and poetry.
December 22, 2025
Everything I know about the letters of the alphabet I learned from Francesca Biasetton. Starting with the First Rule of the War on Trite Lettering: “If you’re unsure whether a piece of lettering was done by hand or with a font, compare two identical letters. If they’re perfectly identical, then it’s a font.”
Okay, it’s true: some fonts cleverly offer two slightly different versions of the same letter. But the War on Trite Lettering, like the war on articles written with Artificial Intelligence and on DJs who use tablets instead of vinyl, needs clear, maximalist rules.
The last thing I learned about the alphabet from Francesca Biasetton dates back to when she asked me to write this little piece. At one point I said something that revealed my belief that block letters were simply the uppercase of cursive.
“Are you crazy?” Francesca exclaimed. “Ugh,” I replied, “who uses cursive uppercase anymore, after fifth grade?”.
Francesca rolled her eyes, picked up a sheet of paper and a brush (I call it a brush just so we understand each other, it was probably a 柔らかい毛筆), and drew something that looked like the number two that, at some point in its life, had decided to reinvent itself as a kerosene lantern.
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Suddenly it all came rushing back: my third-grade classroom from half a century ago, chalk sticks, the orange fountain pen with Pelikan cartridges, and the cursive uppercase “Q” that looks like the number two.
The good fortune of having met Francesca (a long time ago, there were still payphones then) is that, with her, letters stop being merely letters and become a planet governed by its own rules, with physical laws different from ours, and populated by microorganisms in numbers even greater than those found in the soil of a monsoon forest after a downpour.
Let me try to explain it better: Francesca looks at the little label stuck into a mango crumble with vanilla mousse in the window of an aloof downtown pastry shop, the lettering blandly set in Zapfino Extra; the two “g”s in “mango” and “vanilla” sloppily spilling over the allergen list, and in her mind images start rolling of Godzilla biting chunks out of the Tokyo broadcasting headquarters.yo.
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On the other hand, Francesca sees a hand-drawn message on a wall—whether it’s a protest slogan, a declaration of love, anything at all—and instantly recovers a universal hope in the human species.
Of course, this all works in reverse too: where the rest of us would see nothing but an uppercase “K,” Francesca sees coffee grounds, albatrosses hunting sardines, green sprigs of mistletoe sprouting from sun-kissed bushes. And so on.
“Can I write that you’re the Spice Girls of calligraphy?” I asked Francesca when she asked me to write this page.
“Don’t you dare!” she replied.
So I won’t write it. But you should know that it’s true..
Fabio De Luca is an Italian journalist, DJ, and writer, known for his career in music journalism, including his role as deputy editor of Rolling Stone Italy and radio programs on Rai Radio2, and for having interviewed artists such as Daft Punk before their international success.
Francesca Biasetton is an Italian illustrator, calligrapher, and artist whose research moves between mark-making, writing, and visual experimentation. Read her Bio.