The website was originally created simply as a way of organising my collection. Over time, however, it has evolved into a much broader reference archive, bringing together catalogues, rate tables, data and research that may be useful to collectors and researchers interested in Italian philately, postal history and postal markings.

The main sections include:

The collection currently comprises more than 10,000 postal items, including postal stationery and other documents bearing more than 2,000 different stamps, covering definitive, commemorative and service issues. It documents more than 1,500 different postal-rate examples and extends over more than3,000 pages.

A website is not simply a convenient way of presenting a large collection. Its real advantage lies in the ability to connect different ways of cataloguing and studying the same postal document.

A single item can, for example, be accessed through its postal rate, its franking, or its postal marking. From the page describing the item, the reader can move directly to the corresponding stamp, rate or cancellation — and then continue to other documents sharing the same characteristics.

This network of cross-references and internal links allows the collection to be explored from different perspectives and makes it possible to move effortlessly between postal items, stamps, rates, markings and cancellations.

Such a structure would be difficult to reproduce in a printed catalogue, where different classification systems necessarily have to remain separate and moving between them requires extensive cross-referencing.

The website therefore functions not simply as an online display of a collection, but as an interconnected research environment.

The aim is not to build a collection of rare items, but to reconstruct how the Italian postal system actually worked during the Lire era.

For this reason, the website includes both ordinary postal documents — common items that are essential for understanding the everyday operation of the postal service — and less frequently encountered material.

Among the latter are documents illustrating very short periods of postal validity, unusual franking combinations such as twin values, evidence of postal censorship — including examples from the period of the Italian Republic — and postal practices that have since disappeared.

Even apparently commonplace material can be significant. Postcards sent from holiday resorts, for example, may seem unremarkable at first sight, yet can sometimes reveal unexpected postal usages or unusual markings.

The result is therefore both the documentation of a collection and a research resource: not a selection of prestigious or rare items, but an attempt to reconstruct, through original documents, the wider landscape of Italian postal history during the Lira era.