We plan to offer our growing inventory of vintage and antique postcards from Italy, the United States, and other places here in our bookstore website, as we can add them.

Our post card inventory includes many Italian postcards (cartoline italiane) as well as scenes from the United States and other countries.

For Italian postcards, we especially like the period from about 1900 to the 1960s.

Historically, it was a very dynamic period. Parts of northern Italy changed hands from Austria to Italy during World War I, and this is reflected in the postcards from the period 1900-1920. In 1922, Mussolini rose to power, place names in postcard photographs changed (there are Piazze B. Mussolini, for example, in the 1920s and 1930s that are renamed after WWII), and even cancellation marks changed (the year 1925, for example, was noted as the year 25 III, the third year of the Mussolini era).

Our favorite Italian postcards are the real photograph cards (vera fotografia), which are incredibly sharp in their detail.

Here are two examples.

Above is a color-tinted real photograph postcard by Ediz. Griffini Maria, a scene of Laigueglia on the Italian Riviera. Below is a postcard (cartolina) from another of our favorite studios, Foto Ghedina (Cortina, Italy).

As we are able to do so, we will add our postcards to our Cat's Cradle Books website for your shopping convenience.