A sharp-eyed pedestrian pausing at Naples' Piazza Carità in 1940 would have seen exactly this: the bold cylindrical tower of the Palazzo delle Poste rising behind a busy square filled with sleek black sedans, tram wires cutting the sky, and the Singer sewing machine shop anchoring the corner of Via Roma — a city remade in Mussolini's rationalist image just as the war was beginning. This rare real-photograph postcard (vera fotografia) captures the freshly redesigned piazza, completed in the late 1930s as part of the Fascist urban renewal of Naples, with the monumental cylindrical Palazzo delle Poste (designed by Luigi Cosenza and Marcello Canino, inaugurated 1936) gleaming behind the square. The left-side modernist slab with its severe pilasters and the older Neapolitan apartment blocks on the right create a striking collision of architectural eras. Period automobiles — likely Fiat 500s and 1100s — are parked in a casual cluster while sharply dressed Neapolitans go about their day, unaware they are being captured for posterity. The card was published by Vincenzo Carcavallo of Naples in 1940 (Anno XVIII of the Fascist calendar, confirming the year with precision), and bears the Fotoceleré printing mark and a horse-and-rider publisher's emblem on the reverse. Never mailed, never written on — a pristine time capsule of a city on the eve of war.