With the armistice of September 8, 1943, Italy found itself divided in two: in the south, the Badoglio government and the Allies; in the center-north, under the leadership of Mussolini, allied with the Germans, the Italian Social Republic was born.
The new state, among many problems, also had to deal with the preparation of new postage stamps: the Imperial series, widely distributed throughout the territory of the Kingdom of Italy, with large stocks still usable, featured the effigy of King Vittorio Emanuele III on some stamps. It was therefore decided, as a first emergency solution, to continue to use all the values of the Imperial series, but to overprint the postage stamps with the face of the former King, considered a “traitor,” a fasces, and/or the wording of the new republican state.
The overprinting were carried out at the six Provincial Post Offices: Rome, Verona, Florence, Genoa, Turin, and Milan, which used private printers, with the exception of the State Printing Office in Rome, which already produced and printed the Kingdom’s value papers. The overprinting operations at the six aforementioned workshops, carried out using identical zinc plates. were carried out accurately, but not perfectly. Indeed, the different printing presses used, with different printing pressures, the colors of the different inks used, and above all a myriad of small imperfections created during processing on the different impressions of the sheets of one hundred stamps allow us to identify the origin of the sheets themselves, of blocks of stamps, and even of individual stamps, whether new or used, or on envelopes, attributing the correct print run among the six that occurred.
The first volume, describes and documents the Milanese print run. The second volume, describes and documents the large Roman circulation, widely distributed throughout the Italian Social Republic.
These two books are priced at EUR 25 each and can be purchased from Vaccari’s website.
