Tiers of ancient stone seating curve in a perfect semicircle at Pompeii's Teatro Maggiore — the large open-air theatre that once held 5,000 spectators for comedies and tragedies under the shadow of Vesuvius — rendered here in vivid hand-tinted color that makes the terracotta ruins glow against a hazy blue Campanian sky. Built in the 2nd century BC and expanded under Augustus, the theatre was among the first Pompeii structures excavated beginning in the 18th century, and by the Edwardian era it had become one of the site's most-photographed landmarks. Published by the well-known Naples house of C. Cotini and captioned in three languages on the reverse — Italian, German, and French — this multilingual card was clearly aimed squarely at the international tourist trade flooding southern Italy in the years before the First World War.