An interesting (??) meter mark

Mr Lee, thank you very much for at least making the effort. Your analysis is presumably correct; I might perhaps add that the Institute must have judged a very great deal of its work important, since the 'Registered' is printed onto the card, not handstamped, and they have a meter set up for the Registered fee of 15 lire.

However what I find interesting is this:

It was sent from Trieste on the 7th Sept 1950 bearing an Italian 15 lire mark.

So – why not? Well, basically because in 1950 Trieste was not in Italy. And hadn't been since 2nd May 1945 when it had ceased to be part of the Italian Social Republic and was administered by the Allies - after 1947, under the title of the Free Territory of Trieste.The reason for its long exile from Italy, which lasted until 1954, was that it was claimed by Yugoslavia as being originally Slovenian territory.

The Allies therefore continued to administer Trieste until a final decision was made as to whom it was to belong to. Although Italian stamps (and postal stationery) continued to be used there, to show neutrality in the ownership dispute they had to be overprinted to make the point that these were no longer Italian stamps, just neutral stamps in an Italianate currency.

The Italian-cancelling overprints read:

June 1945-Sept 1945: Trieste
Sept 1945 – Sept 1947: AMG VG (Allied Military Government Venezia Giulia)
Oct 1947 – Nov 1954: AMG FTT (Allied Military Government Free Territory of Trieste)

Smack in the middle of this long period we find standard Italian meter marks being used. Shouldn't this surprise us?

At first it did surprise me. Then I began to think – you obviously can't overprint a meter mark easily in the way you do stamps. You would have to withdraw the meter slug and create from scratch a new one with the appropriate wording on it. And you would have to do it for every organization possessing a meter machine. The population of Trieste at this time was around 350,000 so there were probably a fair number of organizations using meters. It seems likely that in the aftermath of a world war, this might not have been high on the priority list as far as time and resources were concerned. [Though if that was a decision it will not have been an easy one. To give just one example of how seriously this nominal 'independence' of Trieste was taken – the communists in the area were forced to start up a whole new Communist Party of Trieste because members of the Communist Party of Slovenia and the Communist Party of Italy were not prepared to work together under the old names and symbols.]

If my conclusion is true, it may also be relevant to meter marks in other states. So what I would like to appeal for now is some feedback from any of you who study any state which changed its state name and issued overprinted stamps with the changed name for a prolonged period – do you have any evidence of changed or unchanged meter marks during that period?

What I would also love to see is whether any of these Italian metered cards were sent outside the border into Yugoslav administered territory and what the postal authorities there would have made of them.

kannik, I am afraid you are reading the card with 'English' eyes. In English via is an idiomatic expression meaning 'by way of'; in Italian it is simply the word for Road or Street. This card is being sent from the Institute at 57 Ginnastica Street to a client living at 24 Madonnina Street - both in central Trieste, and in fact not far from each other:

But try finding the shortest route there using their present one-way system !