Postal Culture Writing and Reading Letters in Post-Unification Italy by Gabriella Romani

It is a romantic and old-fashioned book this one Postal Culture Writing and Reading Letters in Post-Unification Italy by Gabriella Romani, published by University of Toronto Press.

I was intrigued by this book at first because I have always been an avid letter-writer, but I absolutely didn't know anything of the creation of the italian postal system and for what I read it was an enchanting moment for Italy.

Written with devotion whoever will be interested to discover something more about our old postal system and correspondence, passing through books that made the history of italian literature will be more thth enchanted by this book. 

Italy was divided in several many States before the unification of 1861 completed in 1870. Since there there were in Italy many postal systems, of the various Italian Reigns; the most efficient ones based in North of Italy.

The new Postal Sytem unified made people curious regarding letters, postcards, a new way of communication that would have also passed through the same State; from North to South of Italy everyone would have sent the same letter passing through the same postal system.

The place needed to be unified, language included and why not starting with letters and postcards?

If Manzoni the writer of I Promessi Sposi and the writer we must thanks because he unified our language complained because to him postal system was not efficient, writing to a contact in France, there's to say that also people not too much educated and with a little scholarization started to write down letters for staying in touch with parents, relatives and friends who lived distantly, also thanks to our economic postal rates of all Europe promoted by italian postal system. At the moment Italy lives one of the most expensive postal rates of all Europe for postcards and letters.  

With the time as you will read flourished also various kinds of manuals explaining to people how to write a good letter, for various diverisfied occasions.

As it happened in the past there was also somewhere the character of  the letter-writer, the person, who, for hobby, or for a little amount of money read and answered back letters received by people. People searcging for a letter writer could be analphabet or not too secure of his-her written italian and preferred the help of someone more acculturate. 

I remember that everyone told me my granny Marietta was the letter-writer of our area and our house plenty of people when during the last Second World War, relatives received letters from their young men in war in the most diversified places.

She was the only one who had completed all the elementary school because born in another area; she started to live here when she married my grand-dad-

In our territory no one invested in culture and elementary school in the 1940s counted only in the first three years. It was implied that children would have become peasants.

A curiosity I didn't know that the past Postal System was a poetic place where there was also a suggestive, poetic postal calendar at the end of every year for people. Identity of post offices passed also through this important instrument, very beauty with precious illustrations.

An important literary works involving epistolary genre was La Storia di Una Capinera by Giovanni Verga, great esponent of the so-called Italian Verism.

The story this one

Maria is forced to enter in a convent for becoming a nun without too many compliments as also happened to La Monaca di Monza by Manzoni with other results. Maria didn't want to become a nun but her dad a widow remarried a lady and he had to think at the other two daughters. The end is very unhappy, but the book was a great success thanks also to the great power of letter-writing and a style considered absolutely true and felt.

The book  continues with the analysis of Matilde Serao's epistolary fiction.

I find this book adorable and if you love Italy, if you miss your country so much, if you want to know what it meant at first the creation of the Italian Postal System or just for curiosity goes for this book. It is written with love and great competency. I also at first found this book curious because bilingual. It was great reading it in Italian and english.  Beautiful. 

I thank University of Toronto Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori