It was the 12 November 1850, when the Count of Cavour, returning from a meeting at the Subalpine Parliament, announced that an agreement had finally been reached regarding the Postal Reform Law and the introduction of stamps in the Kingdom of Sardinia.

In addition to the Count’s influential personality, the success of the postal reform is attributed to the presence of numerous anglophile parliament members who were inspired by the characteristics and colors of the first British stamps issued a decade before.

Prior to this law entering into force, in the Kingdom of Sardinia, which in 1850 included Piedmont, Liguria, Savoy, Nice County, and the island of Sardinia, the custom dictated that payment of postal service was the responsibility of the recipient.

The new Postal Law (1 January 1851) provided for new tariffs for the interior, new simplified conventions with the major European countries, and the introduction of the adhesive stamp as a means of anticipated payment, while
for a time still allowing the dispatch of unstamped mail with payment by the recipient (through all of 1858).

Count Nomis of Pollone, General Director of the postal administration and responsible for finding means and methods of realization, eventually entrusted to the lithography of Francesco Matraire. The three stamps issued, the 5-cent black, 20-cent blue, and 40-cent rose, were produced in sheets of 50 stamps divided into two 25-stamp squares (5x5), printed by lithographic method on thick, porous paper. The print run is unknown but can be estimated at 250,000 copies of the 5-cent stamps, 900,000 of the 20-cent stamps, and 90,000 of the 40-cent stamps.

The similarity of the 5-cent black with the first English stamp, the ‘Penny Black’, is undeniable. On both stamps, apart from the color, one can observe the lack of the country of origin and the choice to depict the effigy of the sovereign. In the case of the 5-cent black stamp of Sardinia, the effigy was copied from the 10 and 20-lire gold coins of the time (engraving by Giuseppe Ferrari), while in the case of the Penny Black the effigy was derived from a medal engraved by William Wyon in 1837 to honor His Majesty visiting the London guilds.

The 5-cent black was created as postage for newsletters and letters in the city and it is particularly rare to find an exemplar of high quality, whether new, used, or on letters.
The difficulty for collectors to find perfect stamps, whether new, used, or on envelopes, is mainly due to an excessive closeness of the specimens and to the hasty way in which single stamps were often cut by postal officers. The 20-cent blue, which was destined as postage for correspondence within the boundaries of the Kingdom is most commonly found as a used stamp, either single or on a letter. However, the same problems emerge when trying to obtain high-quality specimens of this stamp as with the other stamps from the same issue.

The last stamp, the rarest of the first Sardinian issue, is the 40- cent rose, exclusively used for letters passing double ports within the Kingdom, correspondence to Switzerland, and to the
Lombard-Venetian region, according to the distance. The last auction saw the sale of two new, complete series of differing quality: lot 1004, with a starting price of 7,500 euros, was sold for 10,370 euros, while lot 1005, from a starting price of 5,000 euros, was sold for 11,590 euros.

In the next Fall auction, a third, complete series will be auctioned, the quality of which decidedly above-average.

by MATTEO ARMANDI