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.