Rising with austere medieval gravity over a broad piazza, the great Romanesque bell tower and sprawling arcaded complex of the Basilica of San Benedetto Po fills this atmospheric early real-photo-style card from the Mantova province of northern Italy — a monastery founded in the 10th century and rebuilt in the 16th, whose cloister and basilica rank among Lombardy's most significant Renaissance religious monuments. Published by Pelloni Claudio of Mantova and cleared by the Ufficio Revisione Stampe in Milan on 13 April 1918 — squarely in the midst of the First World War and Italy's desperate Caporetto-to-Piave campaign — this card carries a wartime press-approval stamp that makes it a subtle document of Italian civil censorship. The card is unused and unaddressed, its deckled edges speaking to early printing methods.