120th Anniversary of the First Stamps of San Marino

120^TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST STAMPS OF SAN MARINO

Issue 1997

Public postal services were introduced for San Marino on 7 October 1607, with a "Postillion who will go to collect and carry the letters to the Post Office at Rimini". Two centuries later, in 1833, the Republic’s own proper post office was opened, in a palazzo which overlooked the Pianello. However, the mail was franked, eventually, only in the Rimini office, first Papal, then Sardinian and finally Italian, up to 1852 with the simple handstamp Affrancata and after that with postage stamps.
It was only on 1 January 1863, when new postal regulations came into force in Italy and established that a double tax was payable on unfranked letters, that San Marino decided to provide itself with postage stamps : Italian stamps were therefore obtained in Rimini according to need. When the first postal treaty with Italy was signed on 7 February 1865 San Marino decided to carry on with the use of Italian stamps, at least "for now", since a restricted postal traffic did not yet justify the production of their own stamps. Ten years later, however, the situation had changed.
On 2 March 1877 a postal convention between partners of equal status was signed, as a result of which the two administration retained "for themselves and in its entirety, the tax received by their respective offices" for the franking of letters ; a franking which must "be represented by the postage stamps in use in the respective states" . It was thus that San Marino became the first of the small European states to provide itself with its own stamps. They came into use on 1 August 1877, a month later than had been foreseen in the Convention, because of delays in the delivery of supplies on the part of the Italian government printing works.
These are facts known to everyone (even if some people interpret them somewhat strangely) and were amply commemorated at the time and a book by Alessandro Glaray and Franco Filanci, which even today is still recognised as the definitive text.
Because of this it was felt that the 120^th anniversary should be celebrate in a very different way, commemorating for once the people who conceived and promoted these stamps : individuals who are quite well know, but only to specialist in the field and who have never before been remembered with a stamp, one of those actual "pieces of paper" which played such an important part in their lives.
The first is Count Giovanni Battista Barbavera di Gravellona, who became Director-General of the Sardinian Post Office in 1859, which later became the Italian Post Office, a position he held until 1 February 1880, as well as being a Senator of the Kingdom. His signature appears at the foot of both the postal conventions between San Marino and Italy, alongside those of the two great Councillors and Plenipotentiaries of the Republic, Count Cibrario in 1865 and Senator Vigliani in 1877.
The second is Enrico Repettati, chief engraver for the Officina Carte Valori in Turin (which appears in the background of the stamp), who designed and engraved, or at the very least oversaw the production of, all the postal values issued by San Marino in the 19^th century.
The third is Otto Bickel, the active and often unjustly criticised German dealer in stamps, fossils and virtually anything that could be collected, who resided in San Marino between 1891 and 1894, diffusing knowledge and promoting the collection of the Republic’s postal values through the multi-lingual monthly San Marino-Philatelist and his original illustrated envelopes.
Last but no means least is Alfredo Reffi, Sammarinese stamp dealer and publisher of many distinguished postcards (one of which appears as the background of the stamp), and who was many times a Captain-Regent, who promoted the stamps of San Marino in a intelligent manner, at first with his sales lists and then in the 1930s through an elegant and well-documented catalogue.
Each of the four individuals is pictured within a frame that is inspired in design and colour by the four stamps of 1877, as is the case with the coat of arms reproduced on each sheet.