Naples glitters in wartime darkness — this atmospheric night photograph of the Santa Lucia waterfront captures the famous seafront hotels and their electric lights shimmering in the harbor water, trams visible along the lungomare in a scene of deceptive peacetime calm. Yet the back of this card tells a different story: published in 1942 (Anno XXI of the Fascist calendar, authorized by the Ministry of Popular Culture on 22 August 1942), this is an artifact of Italy's wartime propaganda apparatus, when even tourist postcards required ministerial clearance. The publisher Alterocca of Terni was one of Italy's largest postcard producers and a key supplier of regime-sanctioned imagery. Santa Lucia, home to the Grand Hotel Santa Lucia and the Palazzo Reale waterfront, would suffer Allied bombing raids within a year of this card's printing. The deckle-cut edges are characteristic of Alterocca's wartime production runs. Unused and surprisingly well-preserved for a card printed on wartime paper stock.