The impossibly ornate marble spires of the Milan Cathedral — the Duomo di Milano — pierce a dramatic sky in this striking black-and-white photographic postcard, one of the great Gothic facades of the world captured in full three-quarter view, its forest of 135 spires and 3,400 statues rendered in extraordinary tonal detail. This undivided-back card features a lengthy printed description on the message side noting that the cathedral "is the largest church in the world" (with two exceptions), that its 98 turrets each bear a 15-foot statue, and that the structure took 346 years to build. The reverse instructs senders to affix a "one-cent stamp," placing this squarely in the pre-1907 undivided-back American postcard era. A pristine, unused example that doubles as a miniature architectural treatise — a wonderful artifact of early tourist postcard culture from the age when a single cent carried a card across the country.