Tony Di Spigna drew ITC Serif Gothic and ITC Lubalin Graph with the great Herb Lubalin as art director. Spignarian Script is his penmanship at its purest: true hairlines and smooth swells, penned by hand and refined with countless adjustments. Its intricate swashes carry the Spencerian tradition into type with a confidence few faces can match. For the formal invitation, this is the gold standard.

Alejandro Paul of Buenos Aires powerhouse Sudtipos began Inglesa with caligrafía inglesa, the Spanish name for copperplate calligraphy, then let it grow a personality all its own. Six weights run from a skinny monoline to an elegant black, a companion set of roman caps handles the supporting lines, and a vast bench of alternates, endings, and swashes means no two names ever set quite alike. One step less starchy than Spignarian, but every bit as polished.

Valentina Casali drew Pritzious for Italy’s CAST, looking back to the 1760s, when the financier scripts of Rosart and Fleischman could not connect their letters for technical reasons. Rather than correct that quirk, she celebrated it, opening the connectors on purpose and stocking the font with alternates, initial and terminal forms, and swashes. Flamboyant, historical, and happiest at display sizes, it gives a formal setting a knowing wink.

Victoria Rushton came to type through script lettering, and Gautreaux shows the discipline behind the breeze: by engineering the connection in every letter pair, she built a connecting script that needs only four alternates to flow naturally. Three weights radiate a jovial, vintage-tinged charm, and the sturdy shapes hold up on screens as happily as on cards and packaging. The middle of our spectrum, and the easiest to live with.

Kanna Aoki found her muse in an old book from a Paris bouquiniste, filled with samples of the eighteenth-century bâtarde scripts known as caractères de finance, and drew MVB Chanson d’Amour with their hand-inked texture lovingly intact. Delicate, romantic, and a little rough around the edges in exactly the right way, it makes an invitation read like a love letter that survived the centuries. A little texture, it turns out, is a lot of fun to play with.

And for the closing number, the revivalists at R41, keepers of the Nebiolo archive, bring back Donatello, a script that once lived in the cases of Turin’s storied foundry. Warm, vintage, and unmistakably Italian, it carries the romance of another era’s printed ephemera into modern form, flourishes and all. When the last toast of the season calls for an encore, Donatello takes the bow.