Italy: Vintage Travel Posters Book of Postcards

From Calais to Constantinople, a golden age of rail travel coincided with an inspiring era of poster art, luring tourists to glittering waterways, historic city centers, and sun-bleached villages. In Italy, many of these posters arose from a partnership between the national railway, the Ferrovie dello Stato, and the Italian National Tourist Board, or ENIT (look for their circular crests flanking headlined attractions). Foreign rail companies, too, were in the business and advertised destinations on lines that passed through Italy, helping form a European crisscrossing that brought riders from cities and towns all along the lines.
With eye-catching illustrations and typography, renowned artists and anonymous designers created for the world an ideal escape, positioning the viewer high above their picturesque destination or directly on the water. Though often little is known about these artists today, their stunning works contributed to a boom in Italian tourism during the interwar years, when most of the posters reproduced here were created.