Antique & Vintage Postcards

Twenty tiny black-and-white real-photo views of Lisbon fan out from a battered paper sleeve marked Recordação de Lisboa — 20 Fotografias, each miniature print sharp enough to read the street signs: the Praça do Comércio buzzing with trams and horse traffic, the Torre de Belém rising from the Tagus shoreline, the Monumento aos Heróis da Guerra Peninsular, the Rossio with its wave-pattern cobbles — a compressed atlas of Portugal's capital as it looked in the Estado Novo era. The reverse of the sleeve is stamped A. F. Santo II (likely the Lisbon photographic publisher Aliança Fotográfica or a similar firm) and carries a pencilled price. These accordion-fold or loose-leaf souvenir photo booklets were sold at kiosks throughout Lisbon from the late 1920s through the 1950s; the cars and tram styles visible in the street scenes, combined with the sleeve typography, suggest a c.1930–1940 date. An intimate and tactile survival of pre-war Portuguese tourism ephemera.