The first postal service in Italy was established in the sixteenth century in Piedmont, then part of the kingdom of Savoy. In the nineteenth century the pre-unification Italian states possessed autonomous postal administrations but in 1862, due to the reorganization of the service, the monopoly was reintroduced under the banner of “Regie Poste”.
In 1889 the “Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs” was established and the emblem of the Kingdom of Savoy was used as a logo, that is the white cross on a red background. Already in the early twentieth century, the post office administration, in addition to the transport and distribution of prints and parcels, managed the telegraphic service, the issuance of money orders and the opening of current accounts.
In 1913 the logo appeared with the royal crown and the letters “R” and “P”, the trumpet and some arrows which alluded to the speed of the service offered.
After the war, the logo depicted the two letters “PT”, an acronym for “Poste e Telegrafo” and, later, for “Poste e Telecomunicazioni”.
In the absence of graphic rules, the logos that have distinguished the Italian Post Office have varied over time: the orange bird with tilted lettering and the various “PT” logograms.
In 1996, following the transformation of the entity into a joint stock company, Franco Maria Ricci designed a logo that depicts a letter envelope with horizontal lines extended obliquely to the left to give the idea of dynamism; the official wording was composed with a pardoned font.
For its true autonomy, a new logo was designed by the Fragile studio in 2000: the blue writing “Posteitaliane” within a horizontal “lime” yellow stripe surmounted by the image of a panorama of our country. Original solution because a photographic image is used within a corporate logo and this choice is intended to signal the dynamic identity of the company; the Univers character and the denomination were used in a single word. The pictogram “PT” has been deliberately preserved, even if partially revised, as an element of continuity with the past.
