Aurora was founded in Turin in 1919, making it one of the oldest continuously operating fountain pen manufacturers in the world. The city matters: Turin was — and in certain specific ways remains — the heart of Italian precision manufacturing, a place where the intersection of craft and industry produced objects that still define the category. The Aurora 88, introduced in 1947, was the pen that cemented the brand's reputation. It is still made. And with the Green Marble Revival colorway in Auroloide, it is still worth paying attention to.
What Auroloide Is
Auroloide is Aurora's proprietary material — a celluloid-adjacent compound developed in-house and produced to this day at the Turin facility. It is not acrylic, and the difference is not cosmetic. Acrylic is consistent, predictable, and somewhat flat. Auroloide has depth: colour pools and shifts within the material in a way that requires the right light to fully appreciate, and that photographs cannot adequately capture. The Green Marble colorway is a dark, complex green with veins of lighter green and cream that move through the material like — the comparison is unavoidable — actual marble. It is, among currently produced pen materials, among the most visually rewarding.
The material also carries warmth to the touch in a way that acrylic does not, and ages differently — it develops a patina over years of use that is, to those who notice these things, a virtue rather than a flaw.
The 88 Form
The 1947 design has been refined but not reinvented. The 88 is a classic cigar shape — broad at the middle, tapering toward both ends — in a size that sits solidly between "pocket pen" and "statement pen." It writes without posting the cap, though it can be posted. The clip is substantial without being heavy. The proportions are correct in the way that only a design refined over seventy-plus years can be.
The Filling System
The 88 uses a cartridge-converter system with an additional option: Aurora's proprietary piston filler, which converts the pen to a self-filler with excellent capacity. This dual approach — cartridge convenience when you want it, piston capacity when you need it — is thoughtful and underrated. It accommodates the modern writer's practical reality without abandoning the pleasure of filling from a bottle.
The 14-Karat Nib
Aurora's 14-karat nib is tuned for the Italian writing tradition: a slightly softer feel than a Japanese nib of comparable grade, with a line quality that errs toward expressive rather than precise. It is not a nib for the engineer who wants hair-thin lines. It is a nib for the person who wants their handwriting to look like it came from a person.
The Aurora 88 in Auroloide Green Marble is not a nostalgia play. It is a genuine contemporary argument for doing things the slow way.