Massive terracotta dolia — ancient Roman oil-storage vessels each capable of holding hundreds of liters — stand sentinel in the ruins of a Pompeian courtyard, their great bulging forms casting sharp shadows in the Italian sun, all rendered in the haunting blue-white tones of a cyanotype-process postcard from around 1900. This is card number 726 in the DTC series, captioned in Italian "Vasi per conserva d'olio" (vessels for oil storage), published when Pompeii was still being actively excavated and the postcard craze was just beginning to sweep Europe. The back is formatted as a pure "Cartolina Postale Italiana / Carte Postale d'Italie" undivided back with no message space — the classic pre-1902 Italian format — and the card is unused, pristine, a time capsule from the very dawn of the picture postcard era. The cyanotype blue printing gives these early Italian archaeological cards an otherworldly quality prized by collectors.