Sfizi.Di.Posta. La storia attraverso la posta, la posta attraverso la storia

The following press release was issued by Poste Italiane on 22nd February in Trieste:

On Friday 3 March, in the Mitteleuropa Postal and Telegraphic Museum of Poste Italiane (Central Post Office, via Vittorio Veneto), the documentary exhibition “Sfizi.Di.Posta. La storia attraverso la posta, la posta attraverso la storia” (“Sfizi.Di.Posta. The history through the post, the post through the history“) will open. The exhibition is edited by the philatelist Marco Occhipinti, creator and manager of “Sfizi.Di.Posta”, a space on the web and on Facebook where he tells the stories behind letters, telegrams, postcards, postage stamps and other postal documents.

Through an itinerary consisting of 13 frames with as many as 156 sheets, the exhibition housed in the Trieste Postal Museum highlights about sixty stories set in the time span from the 19th century to the post-World War II period, referring to the spirit that animates Occhipinti’s blog, in which since 2018, every Monday morning, a ‘sfizio’ is published, an article characterised by curious stories, anecdotes about well-known or anonymous people, which always starts from a postal document: letter, postcard, telegram, stamp, cancellation.

“The goal of Sfizi.Di.Posta“, explains Occhipinti, “is to spread the culture of philately and postal history, bringing to light events of the past that would otherwise be forgotten or celebrating certain events, commemorating others, giving credit and honour to the protagonists of the ‘sfizi’ in order to preserve and hand down the memory of facts and people filtered through the lens of the postal document, which thus truly becomes the protagonist of history“.

In the long overview of “Sfizi.Di.Posta”, visitors will be able to “read”, through postal items, some testimonies concerning the Trieste area; the events of the family saga of the Florio brothers, Ignazio and Vincenzo; of Donna Costanza Garibaldi, daughter-in-law of the hero of two worlds, to whom a registered letter sent in 1924 by Beatrice Salvi, director of the Giuseppe Garibaldi Hospital in La Maddalena, is addressed; the sad testimonies of the Jews imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp and the victims displaced by the Polesine flood.

The exhibition will be open until Friday 31 March, Monday to Friday, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., by appointment (+39 040 6764264).