Postal history and postage stamps of Italy
The Italian postal history is from the late national state unification of Italy dominated. Despite its largely fragmented history, Italian soil has made significant contributions to the development of the postal service over the centuries .
Antiquity
The foundations for a separate state post in the Roman Empire were laid by Gaius Iulius Caesar . The Roman Emperor Augustus later expanded it considerably. The "Post" was then called cursus publicus and was directly subordinate to the emperor. The cursus publicus was not approved for private broadcasts. As far as possible, mail was carried by ship . On land the horse was used. For this purpose, stations for changing horses were set up at intervals of around 7 to 14 km. With the fall of the Western Roman Empire , the cursus publicus also disappeared . In the Eastern Roman Empire it lasted until around 520.
For private letters you had to choose other ways: you gave them to traveling friends. However, this sometimes involved a long wait; for example, Augustine once did not receive a letter for nine years. If the distances were not that great, a Roman sent a specially kept slave who walked up to 75 km a day.
middle Ages
In the Middle Ages, communications in Italy was dominated by three institutions: the Catholic Church, the rulers in the various Italian city or area states, and long-distance trade.
The central control of the Church in Rome and the frequent elections of the Pope forced constant correspondence with the dioceses. This also included the involvement of the monasteries, which had their own messenger services. The Italian maritime republics such as Genoa and Venice developed an important long-distance trade, combined with a lively correspondence of the transnational merchant mail. In Florence , Venice , Rome and other places, large banking and trading houses emerged that were networked with each other and with their foreign business partners. However, there was hardly any private correspondence. Since the 13th century, hostels on tourist routes in Spain, Italy and Germany have offered rental horses. The first state relay for the transmission of messages by changing riders and horses came into being in the Duchy of Milan before 1400. The Thurn und Taxis family (Torre e Tasso) , who later became known as postal operators throughout Europe, also came from there.
Modern times
In contrast to the flourishing development in the Renaissance , the postal history of Italy between 1560 and 1860 reflects the political, social, cultural and economic decline of the country, which was largely under foreign control. Limited postal history exceptions are the Republic of Venice, the territory of the House of Savoy and the Papal States .
Kingdom of Italy
The origins of today's Italian postal service lie with the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont , from which the Kingdom of Italy emerged in 1861 . The beginnings of a national post office can be found there at the beginning of the 18th century. After the Napoleonic occupation in 1818, the “Royal Post” (Regie Poste) was the direct predecessor of the Italian postal and telegraph administration established in 1862 by integrating the postal services of the other Italian states. Postage stamps were introduced in Sardinia-Piedmont in 1851. In the first few years after the unification and the fall of the old states, their postage stamps remained in use despite the new postal monopoly, which is why there were sometimes strange mixed postage rates that are of particular collector value today.
In the development of the nation-state postal system, the railways and steam shipping initially played an important role. Because of the poor infrastructure, however, many parts of the country continued to rely on horses. Because of the strong Italian emigration to America , especially to Argentina and Uruguay , the use of post ships soon became necessary. For this purpose, the Lavarello shipping company set up a state-subsidized line connection. In 1874 the Italian consulates general in Buenos Aires and Montevideo opened their own post offices, which again resulted in conspicuous mixed postage, as the national postal monopolies had to be taken into account.
By 1880, around 4,000 post offices had been set up throughout Italy, the services of which, thanks to the gradual decline in illiteracy, were also increasingly being used by the ordinary population. In 1889, the Ministry of Public Works was spun off into the new Ministry of Post and Telegraph , which existed under different names, most recently as the Ministry of Communications, until 2008. In 1906 the sixth World Congress of the Universal Postal Union took place in Rome , of which Italy was one of the founding members. The First World War required the establishment of a large field post organization that was soon more efficient than its civilian counterpart. In 1917 a trial airmail service was set up between Turin , Rome and Palermo , and the first airmail stamps were also issued. Back in 1909 you had for sightseeing flights in Milan and Brescia respective special uses.
After the First World War, not only was the airmail service expanded, but more and more vehicles were also used, especially in areas with insufficient rail connections. The fascist regime tried to drastically rationalize the Italian postal service: in 1921 the Royal Post had 50,000 employees, in 1936 there were only 34,000. At the same time, attempts were made to improve the services of postmen in rural areas. The Second World War , especially the period between 1943 and 1945, severely damaged the Italian post office and its infrastructure. A separate postal administration was set up in the fascist social republic , which arose in northern Italy under German protection.
Republic of Italy
The reconstruction in the post-war period was characterized, among other things, by the expansion of financial and payment services . State authorities in particular processed their payment transactions with citizens via the post office.
In 1967 the postcodes were introduced in Italy .
In the decades that followed, the performance and efficiency of the Italian Post Office steadily declined. In the 1980s it was considered a "hopeless case". In 1986 personnel costs ate up 93 percent of income. In 1989 the average delivery time in Italy was 8.5 days. At the beginning of the 1990s, the first reforms of the badly loss-making Italian Post Office began, which was converted into a stock corporation in 1998 and, after drastic rationalization measures under Corrado Passera, returned to the black for the first time in 2001. In the following ten years, Poste Italiane rose to become one of the leading international companies in the industry under Chairman of the Board of Management Massimo Sarmi. After the postal services were largely liberalized in 2011, the Italian government decided at the beginning of 2014 to partially privatize the company.
See also
literature
- Tarcisio Bottani, Giorgio Migliavacca: Simone Tasso e le poste di Milano nel Rinascimento. Simon Taxis and the posts of the state of Milan during the Renaissance. Corponove, 2008
- Paolo Vaccari: Francobolli e Storia Postale. Trattato storico e catalogo con valutazioni. Antichi Stati Italiani, Governi Provvisori, Regno d'Italia 1850-1900. Vaccari, 2010
- Manual dictionary of the postal system 2nd edition from 1953, p. 367 f
