On Monday I went with my brother and his friend Jean to visit a private postcard collection on a hill above the Colosseum. Enrico Sturani welcomed us into his home and opened up his collection of 140,000 postcards. This two hour experience was the highlight of Jean's visit to Rome! (She is a member of a post card collector's club in Austin, Texas.)
Mr. Sturani was born in Torino seventy years ago but has been living in Rome for many, many years. He keeps his postcards in boxes, portfolios and albums on shelves and in closets throughout the apartment. He began by showing us some of his German Art Deco cards. Then he shared several dozen of his Mussolini postcards. (He has 3,000 of them.) I asked if he had any cards in a futurismo style.
He presented highlights of this art style that are part of his collection, including "100th day cards" sent when a soldier has 100 days remaining in his military service.
It seems that every subject and time period is represented by cards in his collection. To illustrate the breadth of his collecting, he showed us an album of postcards depicting Turkish movie stars from the 1960's. (Right now he is searching for 1953 post cards that show the atomic mushroom cloud in Arizona.)
difficult to imagine someone having so many postcards at home.
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