Tag: Italy stamp

Mythology is filled with stories of romance, heroism, and adventure. A great way to get youth reading, and maybe collecting stamps. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

The stamp today is sponsored by a youth organization promoting the study of mythology. The story presented on the stamp has war, adventure, and romance. The presentation on the stamp is so formal and old fashioned, that I wonder if the effect is lost on the youth of the day. The stamp designers clearly loved the subject matter so their reverence can be forgiven.

Todays stamp is issue A106, a 1.25 Lira stamp issued by the Kingdom of Italy on October 21st, 1930.  The stamp features Anchises and his sailors first viewing Italy after the fall of Troy. The stamp was part of a 9 stamp issue in various denominations celebrating the bimillenary of the birth of Virgil. The stamp was sponsored by the National Institute Figli del Littorio and the higher denominations of this issue included a surcharge benefiting them. According to the Scott Catalog, the stamp is worth $12 used.

The National Institute Figli del Littorio was a fascist scouting type organization that tried to get chapters started among those of Italian descent around the world. They were notably successful in Malta, where the mostly Italian people were under British rule. The real boy scouts of Italy had been banned and the Catholic youth organization had been severly restricted. School teachers were also heavily pressured to sign up the children. In 1937, the organizations both foreign and domestic were directly absorbed by the Gioventu Italian del Littorio, the youth arm of the then in power fascist party.

Long term readers might remember I was more sympathetic to a same era Soviet stamp on their similar Scout replacing Young Pioneers stamp. See https://the-philatelist.com/2018/06/29/soviet-union-1936-the-young-pioneers-take-a-bite-out-of-crime/. Here I admit to being swayed by the fun stamp and the great period video on them that you can see below. Commenters please feel free to post videos of fascist scouts looking harmless. My German uncle was in the Hitler Youth in his youth and I remember gasps at an eighties family reunion at an old picture of the family dinner table with him in a scout uniform that did not benefit from the Nazi armband.

Anchises was a simple sheppard when he was spotted by the God Venus, who fell instantly in love with him. She disguised herself as a maiden girl and got  Anchises alone. He was overwhelmed by her attractiveness and she told him she was really a visiting Princess. Anchises was full of lust and he removed her clothing and they made love. Afterward Venus cast a sleeping spell on him and dressed herself. She then revealed herself as a God to Anchises. He begged to be killed as he thought nothing good could come from a mortal being with a God. She informed him that he would be okay and that she would bear him a son named Aeneas. The baby would be raised by nymphs until age five then brought to him.

Anchises was instructed never to boast of seducing a God or he would anger Zeus. When he did later he was either killed or blinded depending on the telling. He still later featured in Virgil’s story of his son Aeneas. After the defeat of Troy, Aeneas with his father and fellow defeated Trojans went in search of a new home. There travels took them to Crete where many died. They then traveled to Sicily and Carthage. This story is told by Roman poet Virgil in his epic poem Aeneid. The story told the tale of how Aeneas became the father of the Romans. The poem was written about 25 BC.

Well my drink is empty and I will pour another while I imagine myself being seduced by the Goddess of love. I have been married to her for 28 years and I have no fear of Zeus learning of it. Come again  for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2018.

Italy’s government was pretty notorious in 1937. That does not mean that life didn’t go on for Italians. Such as for example, the kids going to summer camp. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

1930s stamp engraving wont be the prime medium for capturing a 500 year old piece of Florence renascance skulpture. It was nice that they included it with the modern images of children on the other stamps in the issue to show the importance of children to society over time and to make the whole issue less political.

Todays stamp is issue A207, a 75 Centesimi stamp issued by Italy on June 28th, 1937. It was a 10 stamp issue in various denominations that promoted the Summer Exhibition for Child Welfare. The higher denominations were semi postal issues that included a surcharge to help fund the camp trips for disadvantaged kids. According to the Scott Catalog, the stamp is worth $17.50 used. The 2.75 +1.25 Lira denomination also used this image but colored blue green, It’s value used is up at $275.

The image on this stamp is “il Bambino”. It was created by sculptor Luca della Robbia in Florence during the 1440s. Della Robbia also worked in stone, bronze, and wood, but he is best known for his work in terra cota. Happy, Holy Spirit filled children were usually his subjects and decorated the alter of many Italian churches of his day. Della Robbia  produced one offs for individual commissions and also more mass market versions.that came from molds. He was successful enough to acquire a great house that contained a workshop that also employed many  of his family members. Indeed the workshop was able to continue in the house for over 40 years after della Robbia’s death.

A reader might be put off a little by the Fascist government coopting della Robbia’s work. The fact is though that the work is now long in the public domain and if you look below you will see a modern poster image of the same work available at Walmart. Interestingly they admit it is a work by della Robbia but date the work to 1912.

Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast Walmart for out coopting even the Fascists. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

The modern Italian Army is not known for it’s military prowess. This is especially true of forces that Italy sent far beyond it’s borders. There was an idea however to recruit locals from the Italian Alps  who would be ready to defend the new territories in the north. The success of this can be seen in the fact that Italy retains all these gained territories. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

On a 100 year anniversary stamp, the stamp designers had the choice to show the Alpini Corps as people imagined it or how it then existed in cold war Italy. The modern troops just have a small extra insignia on their standard uniform, so we collectors are lucky the designers let us see the old Alpine style hats and pack mules so evocative of mountain combat.

Todays stamp is issue A573, a 25 Lira stamp issued by Italy on May 10th, 1972. It was a three stamp issue in various denominations. According to the Scott catalog, all stamps in this set are worth 25 cents whether used or unused.

Prior to the coming together of Italy, the Alpine area was controlled by Austria. It was defended by a network of four large fortifications shaped to form a box shaped defense. This system was called the Quadrilatero and became much more vulnerable with the event of rifled cannons. The land passed to a united Italy in the 1860s. In 1872 A young Captain in the Italian Army wrote an article for a military journal that proposed the forming of an Alpine corps of soldiers recruited in the region to provide a defense of the new regions. The knowledge of the land would provide many advantages to mounting a successful defense. The article came to the attention of the King and was acted upon.

The force was successful in that they were able to prevent a full breakthrough of Italy’s northern defenses when faced with Austrian attacks during World  War I. The fighting saw 114,000 casualties suffered by the Alpine Corps. That is a larger number then today’s entire Italian Army. World War II was less successful for the Alpine Corps. The units without a fight surrendered to the Germans when they took control of Northern Italy to continue the fight against the Allied invasion. One Alpine Corp unit, however that was stationed in Montenegro decided to change sides and keep fighting, this time along side Yugoslav partisans. The Germans were able to raise a new division of Italian Alpine troops that fought beside them to the end of the war. They mainly clashed with Brazil’s Expeditionary Force. That may reflect German opinion of their abilities or loyalty.

The force was imagined as defensive but has still been sent far and wide to Eritrea and Libya in Africa and even to China as part of Italy’s response to the Boxer Rebellion. More recently, units have fought in Afghanistan. None of these deployments turned out particularly well.

In today’s Italian Army, the units are still referred to as the Alpini Corps. However, the force is down to two brigades, which is only 2/3rds of one division. In World War Two, before all but one surrendered without a fight, Italy fielded 6 Alpine divisions.

Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast King Victor Emanuel I. The young captain, later General, I am sure could not have imagined the King would read his article and know a good idea when he read it. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

Leaders fall in and out of fashion. After Italy united as a Monarchy in the 1860s. Revolutionary leader Giuseppe Mazzini fell out of favor as the Italy he imagined was a Republic. He was too liberal for those in power but simultaneously too reactionary and religious for the new left. Fast forward 100 years though and he is exactly the type of anti Communist and also anti Monarchist and pro united Europe fellow to provide an historical basis for the current government. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

Mazzini has had more than a few Italian stamps. Most of them are like this one and don’t make him look very good. The best was the first one from 1921 that showed him as an old man. Less than 50 years after his death, he was perhaps still remembered as a man instead of a figure of history.

Todays stamp is issue A571, a 25 Lira stamp issued by Italy on March 10th, 1972. It was a three stamp issue in various denominations recognizing the death century of Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian unification activist. According to the Scott catalog the stamp is worth 25 cents used. I am not alone in preferring the 1921 issue to the 1972 or the 2005 issue. The 1921 issue is worth $40, despite a 1/100th denomination.

Mazzini was born in Genoa in 1805 when it was part of the French Empire. He was from a well off family and studied the law. From an early age he was a believer in the unification of Italy. He formed a political movement called Young Italy. Cells of the movement were frequently rising up against various city states. As a result, Mazzini was often in exile and twice was even sentenced to death in absentia. In Switzerland he met fellow exiled nationalist from Germany, Poland, and Switzerland. He formed an international Young Europe group that then had subsidiaries of Young Italy, Young Germany. etc. He imagined republics based on Nationality that would then afterwards combine into a United States of Europe.

In the continent wide troubles of 1848-49, Mazzini had his chance. The Pope was forced to flee Rome and a Republic was declared. In charge was a triumpharate with Mazzini the senior figure. The Pope still had friends though not Mazzini who was religious but anti clerical. The French Army arrived three months into the Republic and Mazzini was again off to Switzerland and then on to London.

Though Mazzini was close to military independence leader Garbaldi, he was not in favor of the new united Italian Kingdom under the House of Savoy. He even attempted to start a new uprising against it in Sicily in 1870 and was briefly jailed. After dying he was celebrated by most. Independence leaders of all stripes had been reading his works for many years before the bitterness of his last years. The kind of government he wanted was finally put in place after the war in 1945. Since then Italy and Europe have made much progress, but I sense that Mazzini would have hoped the result would be more of a utopia.

Well my drink is empty and to me figures like Mazzini come up short, Like Sun Yat-sen in China he got famous traveling around complaining about the status quo, but when he was given the chance to rule, he was unable to produce any positive results. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

Italy did a long series of stamps of women in art as portrayed by mostly male Italian artists. By the later stamps in the higher, less printed denominations, they were getting pretty far afield, all the way to Constantinople. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

I had hoped this stamp was a nineteenth century style depiction of Italia, the Latin female embodiment of a nation. To have such a thing on a 21st century stamp would be quite novel. Instead we have something else that was pretty novel. A stamp that focuses in on a women that was a tiny part of a half lost fresco from the Quatrocento period. Proving you never know where a stamp story will go. So start collecting and dig in!

Todays stamp is issue A1142, a 65 Euro cents stamp issued by Italy on March 20th, 2004. It was a 25 stamp issue issued over 6 years that depict women in art. The earlier ones showed the denomination in both Lira and Euros. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 70 cents used. My new catalogs were delivered yesterday from Amos and so from here on out the values will be from the 2020 edition. Out of curiosity I checked the value of the stamp in the older 2017 edition, same 70 cents. No inflation in Italy, perhaps that should be the headline.

The artist of the tiny piece of the fresco depicted on the stamp was Antonio Pisanello. A fresco is a mural painted on fresh still wet wall plaster so that the painting bonds permanently with the wall. Pisanello was born in Pisa but spent much of his time in Verona. That time in Italy was the early Renaissance known as the Quatrocento. Pisanello studied under Gentile da Fabiano and they worked together on several frescos that did not survive. Pisanello received commissions from the Pope, the Doge of Venice and other heads of Italian city states.

“Saint George and the Princess” was commissioned by the Pelligrinni family for their Chapel in the Saint Anastacia Church in Verona. It is considered Pisanello’s masterpiece. It depicts the Princess of Trebizond, a successor state to Byzantium, sending an Knight to do battle with a dragon. It is thought that the dragon represents the Ottoman Turks that were then laying siege to Constantinople. Half of the fresco was lost to a water leak at the chapel in the 19th century.

Soon after this work, from the 1430s, Pisanello changed the medium of his art. He began casting medals with likenesses of those who commissioned them. They were not cast like a coin but rather in bronze. melted in low relief. He believed this better showed the hand of the artist.

Well my drink is empty and I am left with the feeling that todays stamp did not do justice to the artist. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

Remembering Dante Alighieri was something that happen a lot under the Monarchy of the first 80 years of a united Italian state. To a large extent this dropped away after the King was forced to abdicate. At the 100 year mark, it was perhaps time to lay claim on all history as part of the whole. So here we have Dante and the same year there was a reappearance of King Victor Emanuel on a stamp cleverly couched in terms of veterans. The times they were a changing. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

A Centennial is a good time to come together. The Monarchy had promoted Italian unity and a distinct post Roman Italian culture. That was why Dante was so promoted during the Monarchy. He provided part of the historical cultural basis for what was being done in the 19th century Yet after the war this dropped away as the Monarchy was perhaps rightly discredited by the African colonial adventures and the alliance with Germany. Yet in the 1960s there were still a lot of Italians that had participated and sacrificed in those causes while in the service of Italy. The style of the celebration was perhaps a recognition of that.

It was perhaps too early for this reversion. President Kennedy’s speech in honor of the centennial emphasized the Roman Republic and explicitly Greece as the historical basis for modern Italy. No mention of the monarchy and an American style human rights come from God and not through a King reference. America kept a close eye on Italian politics post war as they were opposed to monarchists or a communist takeover by way of the ballot box.

This pushback can be seen in the stamps as well. Another honoring veteran stamp made clear it only meant veterans that fought for the Allies, a tiny minority. Another implying the Italians were prisoners of a Nazi concentration camp. They were not referring to Italy’s few Jews.

The outreach to monarchists ended suddenly by a pretender overplaying a weak hand. The Last King Umberto II had abdicated not by choice in 1946 and lived in exile in Portugal. In 1969, his estranged first born son, Victor Emanuel, declared himself unilaterally King of Italy from Switzerland. Naturally this turned any talk of Monarchy into a joke. He then married a non Royal Swiss heiress without seeking the required permission of his father. A second cousin then claimed that put him out of the line, and second cousin in. Clearly a line to nowhere.

In 1983, the last Italian King Umberto II was ailing. The then current Italian Head of State President Sandro Pertini, a socialist, requested that the post war Italian law be changed and Umberto II be allowed to come home and die. This was refused. Umberto II died abroad and no representative of the Italian government was present at the funeral. The American view of Italian history was now the vogue.

Todays stamp is issue A489, a 40 Lira stamp issued by Italy on October 21, 1965. It was a 4 stamp issue in various denominations remembering the 700th anniversary of the birth of Dante Alighieri. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents.

Well my drink is empty and so I will consult with American authorities as to who these days I am allowed to toast. I expect they will just suggest I put the bottle away, always the safe choice. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.