Golden sunset light floods the Grand Canal as gondoliers glide past the cream-coloured façade of the Hotel Regina on Venice's Riva, in this richly chromolithographed Italian view card postmarked Roma, July 1929 — the year Mussolini's Lateran Treaty reshaped Italian politics, yet tourists from the American Midwest were still marveling at Holy Land and Armenia visits. The sender, who signs themselves simply as a friend writing to Ed and his wife in Mound City, Illinois, had just come from Venice and Florence and was heading to Rome, and mentions visiting "many Armenian refugees and other American Board stations" — a remarkable reference to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), active in post-genocide Armenian relief work. The campanile of San Marco rises in the mid-distance, gondolas dot the shimmering water, and the warm orange sky gives the scene a painterly, almost theatrical glow.