Behind Sfizi.Di.Posta there is not “we”. My name is Marco Occhipinti, and several of the people who follow Sfizi.Di.Posta already know me in the philatelic environment that I have been attending at various levels for decades. I have been collecting letters, postcards and postal history in general since the mid-1980s.
The documents I show through Sfizi.Di.Posta are all physically in my hands. It is a rule I have set for myself, although there would be nothing wrong (with proper permissions) with publishing stories around documents that are not mine. But as a question of integrity I have made this choice. So don’t hold it against me if I turn down proposals to send scans, it is not a refusal on a personal level.
What do I publish? It is enough to scroll through the various posts to understand that for me the ‘rare’ item is not the ‘expensive’ one, but the ‘curious‘ one.
A little girl writing to her parents, clandestine love affairs, worries about the war, official telegrams, the wholesale cost of Sicilian almonds, and many other curious stories.
The aim is to tell these stories, to pass on their memory, to give credit and honour to those people who were part of our past but who are a living part of our present. If we are who we are, we owe it to those stories and those people.
To tell these anecdotes and curious stories I will use letters, postcards, telegrams, stamps, cancellations, and any other postal document of which I will never, or almost never (when it is functional to the story I am telling), focus on the technical aspects: this is not the purpose.
Sfizi.Di.Posta, therefore, is the sole and exclusive expression of the pleasure in publishing these stories. There is no commercial activity behind it (the purpose is not to sell these documents: they are not for sale, I underline that) or political ends (some historical facts may lend themselves to political commentary: this is not the purpose, and I will be careful not to do so).
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The articles are written in Italian, but you can use a handy plugin provided by the site to translate everything into English, French, German, Portuguese or Spanish on the fly.
Thanks for your attention, and… see you at the next curious story!
Marco Occhipinti
Categories of the stories