Republic of Italy

In 1945, Allied troops drove out German troops, the Fascist government fell, and Mussolini was killed by Italian resistance fighters. King Vittorio Emanuele III first turned control of the country over to his son, Umberto II. On May 9, 1946, the King abdicated, making Umberto II the new king of Italy. On June 2, 1946, under the agreement and direction of the new king, an institutional referendum was held. Over twenty-three million citizens voted whether they wanted to continue with a constitutional monarchy or to become a republic. A little over fifty-four percent voted for a republic. This ended the monarchy and began the republic. At the same time, a Constituent Assembly elected to write and decided on a new consitution, which took effect January 1, 1948.

Note

This album is pretty straightforward. The pages are ordered by date and then grouped by decade. Later I may group them in more interesting ways, based on some historical periods of Italy – as I did with the previous albums.

Since there are so many stamps and pages in this album – they made many more stamps when postmasters realized they could increase revenues from collectors by issuing extra stamps – I haven’t had time to write descriptions of the stamps, or even the highlighted ones. For now, I’m just trying to get all of the pages and stamps up to the current completed year, and post them on this site.

Album Pages

In the left margin are lists of all of the pages I have so far in this album. They’re grouped by types: the commemoratives are grouped by decades first, with other types (e.g., air mail stamps) in groups that follow them. Each group and sub-group is mostly ordered by the year of issue. These stamps are from 1946 – when the Kingdom ended – until 1999. Eventually, I’ll buy all of the pages to bring this album up to the current time – at least to the previous year.

On each web page is a scanned image of a page from my stamp album, showing the stamps I own. You may click on that image to see a larger version. There will eventually be on those pages some comments about the stamps.

Below all of that on each page is a table listing the stamps, ordered and numbered based on the rows and spots where the stamps are positioned on the album page – in the scanned image. It includes the ones I don’t yet own. Each listing has a brief description of the stamp and its catalog number from three popular catalogs. If you want to see more information on a particular stamp or a larger color image of it, click on the name of the stamp in the table and you’ll be taken to the corresponding page on Colnect’s site.