From the early ascents to the innovations of the siege of Paris 1870: a story of primacies between France and Italy.
When all communication routes are interrupted and, above all, when the transmission of information represents a primary necessity, how can messages and letters be transmitted?
This important question is the basis and source of inspiration for a conference on the topic that will take place in Florence on March 22, 2024, at the Istitut Francais de Florance, located at Via Ognissanti 2. The speaker will be Dr. Alessandro Pratesi, a member of the Institute for the Study of Postal History and also a member of our association.
We will see how this “necessity” has sharpened “ingenuity,” even in extremely complex and difficult situations, accelerating sudden technical progress for the enjoyment of our atmosphere, resorting to the resources of pure inventiveness, in a surprising pursuit of “surpassing oneself” between those who need to communicate and those who would like to prevent it, as a very powerful weapon of pressure on civil society.
Indeed, one of the first great frontiers of human ingenuity was to use the ether to transmit mass messages, obviously on paper support, in cases where physical transport by land or sea was not practicable. The same goes for military information. A history rich in stimulating and little-known insights, which can be rediscovered together.
All this always starting from a particular point of view: not the academic one or that of professionals, but that of the collector who researches, acquires, studies, and lines up documents that reconstruct a historical path that fascinates him. This is the approach that inspires Alessandro Pratesi, and almost all of the documents that will be shown are the result of decades of research activities, to prepare his collections.
