Every issue of Aortica is a true production number, created by Mone Maurer and Piero Borsellino — two creative minds who treat the magazine as an exercise in sustained astonishment. Each edition is devoted to a specific travel destination, and from cover to final page, the entire publication is designed to surprise its reader at every turn. The unusual format — 20 by 23 centimetres — signals from the moment you pick it up that this is not a standard travel magazine. The cover features blind embossing. The contents are printed on varying paper stocks. Neon colours and metallics appear where you least expect them.
The substance beneath the spectacle is the genuine curiosity that Maurer and Borsellino bring to each destination. Aortica is not interested in the tourist version of a place. It wants to know the people, the textures, the contradictions — the things that make a country or a city feel real rather than curated. The design serves this purpose: by making the physical object as surprising and multisensory as the destination it describes, Aortica turns the act of reading into an act of travel.
Most travel magazines sell you a fantasy. They show the best light, the best angle, the version of a place that fits on a postcard. Aortica is more interested in the version that does not — the contradictions, the rough edges, the details that only emerge when you stop sightseeing and start paying attention. Each issue is the product of that attention, applied equally to the content and to the object itself.
The name refers to the aorta, the body’s largest artery, the one that carries blood from the heart to everywhere else. It is a grand metaphor for a magazine that sees travel as the circulatory system of human experience — the thing that keeps us alive, connected, and flowing. The production quality is the heartbeat. The stories are the blood.