In the past, even documents traveling by post, if they came from a place where an epidemic was in progress, had to be disinfected before moving to the countries they were headed to. Like the picture documents. It is a letter, dated 1778, from the ambassador of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in Istanbul. The letter underwent the practice of disinfection by "fumigation". This is clearly seen in the superscription. Look at the color. It is latte because the paper has been exposed to fire. The clear mark imprinted on the document, on the other hand, is the mark of the gripper used to hold the document during disinfection. Fumigation was not the only practice used for the disinfection of postal documents. There was also disinfection through the vapors of vinegar or with perfumes, or through the vapors of medicinal herbs.

How did the @ symbol end up in a letter from 1795? The person who wrote the letter you are looking at used this symbol without much wonder because it had been used for centuries. The @ symbol was already used in the Middle Ages. Merchants used it to indicate a unit of weight and capacity: the amphora. Over time it was used with the meaning of "a". In Italy it spread in the letters to indicate "addì" and "anno domini", before the date, or on the front of the superscripts to indicate "near" or "there" before the destination city, as in the letter you see. The snail as we know it saw the light in 1971, when an American engineer chose this symbol for his first e-mail. Today, @ is part of everyday life all over the world. The hugely popular @ is also an extraordinary symbol of mediation - in Spanish, for example, it has begun to communicate gender neutrality - and a way of telling the changing technological and social relationships of a rapidly changing world. It has also become part of the collection of a large American museum: the MoMA in New York.

The post horn was a wind instrument used by postal couriers to signal the arrival of mail. This tool can describe the mail delivery activity from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century and specifically the work done by the Tasso in the transmission of letters, documents and small parcels. In the organizational system of the transmission of information between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Tasso family established themselves by managing the Habsburg post office at the service of characters such as Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg and Charles V. The family thus found itself organizing the postal service for the emperors on an increasingly extended territory, which covered almost all of Europe. Thanks to the large economic resources made available to the Tasso by the Emperors, the taxi couriers were able to organize a delivery service based on relay races for which the courier and horse, after traveling a maximum of 20 km, had to be replaced. The operation took place quickly, because the postmaster, the owner of the post office, had already arranged the change. This happened because the courier, as he approached the post station, blew the post horn, the postmaster recognized the sound and prepared the horse, courier and correspondence for the change. The post horn is identified with the speed of the service carried out by the Tasso: a letter from Brussels to Paris, in 1516 in the summer, was delivered in a day and a half. Furthermore, behind this tool there is the organizational world of the Tassian company and of modernity with which the family was associated. The Tasso were defined as the organizers of the modern European postal system, both for the speed with which they organized exchanges, and for the organizational skills of a service managed as a multinational, and because, for the first time, places, days and stable times of departure and arrival of the post office. The Badgers united Europe through communication in unsuspecting times and the post horn, still a symbol of the post office in many European states, tells all this.

The letter you see has a peculiarity. On the right side, three writings are visible one below the other joined by a parenthesis. In modern times the superscripts or the overcoats bore signs that constituted a sort of visual summary or symbols of the type of communication. They were symbols rich in political, economic and social content. In this envelope, for example, on the right, we find the word "cito" repeated 3 times: it is the reinforcement of "citissime" (from the Latin "citius") and is nothing more than an incitement to run to go fast or "flying ".

In the past, even documents traveling by post, if they came from a place where an epidemic was in progress, had to be disinfected before moving to the countries they were headed to. Like the picture documents. It is a letter, dated 1778, from the ambassador of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in Istanbul. The letter underwent the practice of disinfection by "fumigation". This is clearly seen in the superscription. Look at the color. It is latte because the paper has been exposed to fire. The clear mark imprinted on the document, on the other hand, is the mark of the gripper used to hold the document during disinfection. Fumigation was not the only practice used for the disinfection of postal documents. There was also disinfection through the vapors of vinegar or with perfumes, or through the vapors of medicinal herbs.

The Penny Black is the first stamp issued in the world. The museum has a franked copy on a letter dated June 28, 1840. The stamp was born in England thanks to an important postal reform carried out by Rowland Hill, a British official, during the reign of Queen Victoria. The postal reform was designed to simplify and streamline the delivery of mail in the kingdom, prevent the spread of illegality associated with shipments, unify the numerous tariffs present in the territory for which the payments of the mail varied by the distances, the number of sheets and the weight and reduce the very high costs of the service. The British monarchy realized that illicit behavior had spread to circumvent the Royal Mail, the mail of the monarchy, and that people did not pay the amount due and often letters and packages returned. England in the mid-nineteenth century was a kingdom in great change, we are in the century of the masses and public opinion, in which people read and write and need to communicate, but the high costs and complexity of the postal service did not facilitate people to communicate. Roland Hill understood the need for a radical reform of the postal system: he understood that the lower the postal rate, the higher the profits would be, because more people would communicate. In this way, the postal reform cut costs, 1 penny for a shipment, but forced people to pay before shipping by purchasing a special stamped paper. It was the stamp, the Penny Balck worth 1 penny and black in color. The postage stamp revolutionized the information transmission system because it democratized information. In fact, more and more people in the kingdom could afford 1 penny to buy the stamp, everyone could communicate regardless of class and income. The Penny Black went into circulation on May 1, 1840 and the subjects of Queen Victoria could see the face of their sovereign every time they bought that adhesive label. Indeed, Rowland Hill decided that the Penny Black should depict Queen Victoria's face in profile, so that the queen's face could be recognized and known to everyone in the kingdom. The black color was decided, as well as for its elegance, because it was functional for sorting letters in post offices where electricity was not yet widespread: the employees could easily recognize the payment of the tax because the black created a contrast with the white paper immediately visible.

The postal guides were published by printers to offer travelers, but not only, a useful tool to organize the trip, not differently as it happens today with tourist guides. This genre began in the mid-16th century: the first practical guide for travelers was published in 1552 by Charles Estienne in Paris. The postal guides were widely used and, thanks to their format, could be contained in the pockets of clothes. During the journey they were consulted constantly, for this reason these guides are often found worn and wrinkled today. They contained useful information for the journey such as: the location of the post stations, the routes to reach your destination, useful advice on changing coins, on how to stay healthy, how to take care of the horses and the indication of the materials necessary for a safe and comfortable journey. The first printed itinerant guide is that of the French publisher Charles Estienne in 1552. In Italy the guide of Ottavio Codogno, lieutenant of the Milan Post Office in the second half of the seventeenth century, had great success, so much so that it was published several times during the seventeenth century .

In the past, even documents traveling by post, if they came from a place where an epidemic was in progress, had to be disinfected before moving to the countries they were headed to. Like the picture documents. It is a letter, dated 1778, from the ambassador of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in Istanbul. The letter underwent the practice of disinfection by "fumigation". This is clearly seen in the superscription. Look at the color. It is latte because the paper has been exposed to fire. The clear mark imprinted on the document, on the other hand, is the mark of the gripper used to hold the document during disinfection. Fumigation was not the only practice used for the disinfection of postal documents. There was also disinfection through the vapors of vinegar or with perfumes, or through the vapors of medicinal herbs.

The document in the image is a Fede di Sanità or Patente di Sanità, kept in the museum, issued by the Bergamo health system on February 28, 1721 and seen in the Brescia health office on March 7, 1721. But what is a Fede di Sanità or health license? Even in the past, states adopted restrictive measures to block the spread of epidemics. For example, the Serenissima Republic of Venice, also dominant of the Bergamo territories, set up strict sanitary lines with the soldiers placed to guard the borders and the authorities in charge of the ports organized the default, or the quarantine of goods and letters, in well-spaced canals and islands. from the city. These figures had to check that the goods entering the territory were accompanied by health faiths, specific documents, issued from the place of departure, which attested to the conditions of free circulation (the document kept in the museum is an example). Furthermore, the goods and the letters had passed to the "purge" or underwent the practice of disinfection in the lazarets because they were considered possible vehicles for the spread of the contagion.

The image you see is a postal-themed engraving, preserved in the museum, published in 1842 in the book "The Life of a sportsman" by Charles James Apperley (also known as Nimrod). The drawings are by the English painter and engraver Henry Thomas Alken (1785 - 1851) known for his sporting illustrations dedicated mainly to horses and hunting. "Four in Hand" or shot four, shows a stagecoach pulled by four horses, in which it is curious to note that the passengers also traveled outside the carriage. This was possible thanks to the modifications and modernizations that passenger transport had at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Technical innovations made it possible to increase the weight carried and increase the speed of the vehicle. Moreover, thanks to the introduction of the brakes on the rear wheels, a figure of our fairytale imagination was born: the coachman. The coachman drove the horses from above, as you can see in the image, and replaced the figure of the postillion who drove the stagecoach sitting directly on one of the draft horses. The literature is full of anecdotes about stagecoach travel, such as that of the English romantic writer Leigh Hunt. The writer describes the journey by postal coach as democratic: "a stimulus to the development of a good liberal spirit, since the passengers are so variously mixed with it, so occasionally paired [...] so eager to spend together and with delight a certain period of time [...] that it is difficult for them not to get used to talking, or perhaps thinking kindly about their neighbors ".

The object of the image is a nineteenth-century writing set. You can recognize the inkwell, to support the quill, the cylinders that housed the ink and the container for the absorbent powder. The "goose quills" represented the writing tool par excellence in the Middle Ages. They were made from the plumage of birds such as geese and swans. Before being used they had to be worked on. The process involved cleaning the beards, a first oblique cut with a subsequent temperature (through immersion in hot sand) of the pen to degrease it and make it more resistant. The pen was then finished to define an opening of at least 2 cm, a sort of internal chamber. Finally, the beak was trimmed to make the tip according to the type of writing. There were also other writing tools besides the quill, such as the silver mine or the lead stylus, the latter used for the initial drawing on the parchment.

The object of the image is a US postal scale (datable to the 1940s) that belonged to Stephen Kielbasa (1917-1975), born in the United States of Polish immigrant parents. Its history is linked to that of its owner, Mr. Kielbasa. After the end of the war, Mr. Kielbasa worked as a mechanization technician at the parcel sorting department of the Tapley Street Annex Post Office, in Springfield, Massachussetts. As part of the family had remained or returned to Poland, and letters were the only means by which to stay in touch, Mr. Kielbasa kept a constant correspondence with his relatives, hence the need to purchase this postal scale for home use. The scale shows the shipping costs corresponding to the weight of the letters, so you could know how many stamps to put on the envelope without having to go to the post office. In the Kielbasa home, as in any US home, it was customary to send letters and postcards to numerous relatives and friends for all the most important occasions and holidays, so this scale was certainly a valid helper.

The spheres you see are two rotating heads used in electronic typewriters to imprint characters on the paper. The heads replaced the hammers connected to the keys that beat on the inked ribbon, which entered the collective imagination also thanks to the Olivetti Lettera 22. It was IBM that launched the IBM Selectric on the market in 1961, an electronic typewriter also called "machine with the golf ball "precisely because of the shape of the rotating heads. The head could be easily changed allowing you to print with the typeface (the "font") you preferred. Look at the head on the left in the image, if you look closely, at the top, there is the word "Delegate". Do you know what that means? Delegate was an uppercase typeface. The rotating head has also become famous in Italy for having been used in the initials of the TG3 from 1987 to 1999.

In 1992 Olivetti presented the Notebook, an extremely compact laptop with which it inaugurated the category of sub-notebooks, the current netbooks. The Notebook is in A5 format and is a DOS compatible laptop with multimedia functions, unusual for those times. The Notebook was defined as “a technological jewel” by the specialist magazines of the time. It had an LCD monitor, basic software pre-installed, and had a digital recorder that could run even when the computer was turned off. The notebook was a small revolution, useful for all those people who needed to always have this tool with them for work.

Rare example of the Conquered Jerusalem of 1593, edition dedicated to Cardinal Cinzio Personeni Passeri Aldobrandini. This is the first edition of the final revision of the Jerusalem Liberated, printed in 1593 with the title of Jerusalem Conquered. To bring Torquato Tasso to this new version were above all religious scruples. In fact, he wanted to eliminate a series of passages deemed inappropriate, so he rewrote the poem by removing all the love scenes and accentuating the religious and epic tone of the plot. Thus some of the best episodes of the liberated Jerusalem were suppressed, such as those of Erminia and Olindo and Sofronia. Furthermore, there were reasons of a literary nature: Tasso aimed at a more rigorous unity, at a greater historical truth, at more serious and solemn tones that denote a moralistic stiffening and a narrowing of the fantastic and evasive spaces. Torquato Tasso dedicated the Conquered Jerusalem to his friend and protector Cinzio Personeni Passeri Aldobrandini (1551-1610) on the occasion of his appointment as cardinal in 1593.