Italy - Centenary of Italian Railways

Italy is a unitary parliamentary republic in southern Europe. Rome, the capital of Italy, was for centuries a political and religious center of western civilization as the capital of the Roman Empire and site of the Holy See. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Italy endured numerous invasions by foreign peoples, and for most of its post-Roman history, Italy was fragmented into numerous city and regional states, but was unified in 1861. In the late 19th century, Italy possessed a colonial empire. Italy plays a prominent role in the military, european and world cultural, diplomatic and affairs.

The series of the Centenary of Italian Railways is a series of stamps of the Kingdom of Italy issued December 15, 1939 to celebrate the hundred years since the inauguration of the first Italian railway Naples-Portici, which unfolded on the Tyrrhenian coast at the foot of Vesuvius.

The Naples-Portici railway was the first railway line built in Italian territory, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, it was double-track and had a length of just over seven kilometers (7.25 km) and was inaugurated on 3 October 1839 with great solemnity

The stamps of the series, printed in rotogravure in sheets of 60 (x4), have as their subject the steam locomotive of the first Italian train (operating on the Naples-Portici line) and a more modern electric train.