As usual, I came across a great 1971 Italian movie poster when trying to find something else. The poster for "La Morte Cammina Con I Tacchi Alti" (directed by Luciano Ercoli), was made by an unknown artist and includes a terrific font. Cortese was based on this film poster font, however as I started working on the glyphs, I figured they would even look much better in ligatures.
So here it is: Cortese typeface - total with 135 ligatures, accents and even Greek and Cyrillic!
Font Family: Cortese Regular