Milan & Venice News

The stamps on this page relate to newspapers. It seems that as a tax on newspapers, you had to buy a stamp from the post office for each newspaper. But that seems odd. It may be that if the newspaper was delivered by the post office, perhaps from locations far away, you had to buy a stamp. That would account for the postage due newspaper stamps – the four at the bottom.

Still, I wonder how that went: a newspaper publisher would send a newspaper in the mail to a subscriber. If they forgot to include the stamp, it would be delivered with a postage due stamp and the postman would collect the cost of the stamps from the subscriber upon delivery? Seems cumbersome and odd. Nevertheless, there are many things they did in the early years that seem strange now. I’ll have to research this.

Note

These stamps, in particular the top four of Mercury, messenger to the gods, are nice looking. I’d like to own them. I haven’t bought any yet. I’ve seen very few for sale or at auction. The ones I did see were absurdly expensive. Hopefully, I’ll find them one day at a price I can afford to pay.

Contains 12 spots: own 1 – 1 unused, 0 used.
Album or Web Page Last changed Jun 5, 2023

Stamp Details

The table below lists information about the stamps shown on this page of Lighthouse’s stamp album. For more details about a particular stamp, click on its description. That will take you to the related web page of Colnect.

spot

own

catalog

subject

description

comment

Newspapers

1.1	✓	G1	Mercury	3c (1851) newspaper, blue
1.2		G2	Mercury	3c (1851) newspaper, blue
1.3		G3	Mercury	3c (1851) newspaper, blue
1.4		G6	Mercury	3c (1851) newspaper, blue
2.1		G8	Francesco Giuseppe	1.05s (1858) newspaper, blue
2.2		G9	Francesco Giuseppe	1.05s (1859) newspaper, lilac gray
2.3		G10	Francesco Giuseppe	1.05s (1861) newspaper, dark gray
3.1		G11	Coat of Arms	1.05s (1863) newspaper, grayish brown

Newspaper Postage Due

4.1	S1	Coat of Arms	2k (1853) newspaper, dark green
5.1	S2	Coat of Arms	1k (1858) newspaper, black
5.2	S3	Coat of Arms	2k (1858) newspaper, vermillion
5.3	S4	Coat of Arms	4k (1858) newspaper, dull red

Footnotes

Spot refers to the postion of the stamp on the album page (e.g., 3.2 indicates row 3, position 2).
Amt. is an abbreviation for the face amount of the stamp.
Own indicates the stamp status: ✓ for unused; ✗ for used or canceled; ⭑ signifies I ordered one; ; ✨ indicates it was bought recently; ✠ means an auction bid is pending; and ◎ is used, and it costs too much for unused.
To search by catalog number, go to the search box and enter it in the catalog number box. However, it’s a bit broken; I need to fix it.