Consociazione Turistica Italiana - Guida Breve d'Italia (serie volumi I-II-III) - Guida dell'Africa orientale italiana - 1937-1940

Brief Guide to Italy – Complete series in 3 volumes with maps – Touring Club Italiano / Consociazione Turistica Italiana, 1937–1940

Interesting complete series of the first edition of the “Guida breve d’Italia,” published by the Touring Club Italiano and later by the Consociazione Turistica Italiana between 1937 and 1940.

The work was conceived as a compact version of the renowned Red Guides, intended to accompany the traveler through itineraries, city descriptions, monuments, connections, and tourist information.

The lot includes:

1. Northern Italy – Volume I
Touring Club Italiano, Milan, 1937 – XV
384 pages, with geographic maps and city plans.
2. Central Italy – Volume II
Consociazione Turistica Italiana, Milan, 1939
448 pages, with geographic maps, city plans, and appendix “City Plans of Rome.”
3. Southern and Insular Italy – Libya – Volume III
Consociazione Turistica Italiana, Milan, 1940 – XVIII
448 pages, with 8 geographic maps and 34 city plans.

Total: 1,280 pages, in addition to the maps and the off-text appendices.

All the maps contained in the three volumes are intact, including those that are folded. The appendix dedicated to the maps of Rome attached to the second volume is also present.

Particularly interesting is the third volume, which includes Libya within the geographic and political context of Italy’s colonial era. Reprints published after World War II no longer carried Libya in the title or in the contents.

The series also documents the change of name of the Touring Club Italiano, indicated in the first volume with its original name and in the two following volumes as “Consociazione Turistica Italiana,” a designation adopted during the fascist period.

Guide to Italian East Africa – Consociazione Turistica Italiana, 1938

Guide to Italy dedicated to Italian East Africa, published in Milan in 1938 by the Consociazione Turistica Italiana, as a supplement to the magazine Le Vie d’Italia. First edition, declared in the title page to be 490,000 copies and distributed free to the members of 1938.

The volume counts 640 pages and includes color geographic maps, plans of inhabited centers and buildings, as well as sketches and coats of arms. An editorial and cartographic testimony of the era, interesting for collectors of historical guides, cartography, and early 20th-century history.

The volumes retain the original flexible red cloth bindings, with silvered titles impressed on the front boards and spines.

Vintage conditions, with signs of time and use: discolorations and halos on the covers, wear along edges, corners and spines, locally frayed fabric, worn bookmark ribbons and yellowing pages. The maps are intact and legible.

The photographs show in detail the state of preservation and form an integral part of the description.

An fascinating document of the history of tourism, cartography, and Italian publishing in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly suited to collectors of historical guides, Touring Club publications, and documents from the fascist and colonial periods.

Careful packaging and trackable shipping.