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Postcard 1898 Rome Terme di Caracalla Frigidarium Ruins Italy Real Photo
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Pre-linen · 1898

Postcard 1898 Rome Terme di Caracalla Frigidarium Ruins Italy Real Photo

Rome, Italy1898Pre-linenGood

Moonlit grandeur in sepia ink — a traveler named Isidor dashed off this 1898 view of the Baths of Caracalla's ruined Frigidarium to his niece Jenny in Berlin, scrawling news of his Italian Grand Tour across every spare centimeter of the card. The image, published by Stengel & Co. of Dresden (no. 11098), captures the towering brick hulks of Rome's third-century imperial thermae, their arched niches stripped bare by centuries of spoliation, the rubble-strewn nave stretching toward a distant apse — a composition that was already a tourist icon when Isidor posted it on 7 February 1898. The card traveled via the Italian "Cartolina Postale" format, franked with a 10-centesimi Italian Kingdom stamp bearing the portrait of King Umberto I, and reached Berlin NW 40, Lehrter Str. 48, where the postman's blue delivery oval records its arrival. On the message side Isidor mentions stopping at the Consulate, heading next to Naples, and urges Jenny to send a small parcel — a vivid capsule of late-Victorian independent travel.

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PC-00102 · Stengel & Co., Dresden
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