Goodbye to the old mailbox, the smart one arrives

 Since the 1960s it has been an icon that stands out, with its red color, in Italian cities and towns: it is the mailbox that now becomes smart.

Citizens will be able, in addition to posting correspondence, to receive information on the weather (humidity, temperature, the poor thin ones) and on their Municipality, thanks to a screen incorporated in the box and connected to the internet.

Milan is the first city in Italy to host the new smart mailboxes by Poste Italiane: at the moment they have been installed in the heart of the city, in via Cordusio, piazza Duomo and via Orefici. Equipped with an 'e-ink' screen, similar to the one found on e-readers, in addition to conveying useful information for citizens, they are equipped with sensors that detect the presence of correspondence inside and allow Poste to optimize the withdrawal phase, reducing the environmental impact. In this first phase, 46 smart boxes will be installed in Milan and there will also be new installations in the main Italian cities, in Turin, Rome, Naples for a total of 100 new boxes. In 2022 there will be 12,000 smart cassettes in Italy: "in Italy there are about 40 thousand cassettes that over time will have a revisitation towards what is the smart cassette, with a path that will see us busy until 2022 with the replacement of a good number of the cassette park ", explained Gabriele Marocchi, manager Engineering by Poste Italiane.

At 60 years of age, they therefore adapt to the times. The 'mail boxes', as they were called, have come a long way since they appeared in Italy at the end of the nineteenth century, following the evolution of Italian society, between world conflicts, the end of the monarchy and the beginning of the Republic . The first mailboxes of which we have news date back to 1886 when the General Directorate of the Post Office stipulates a contract with Ettore Calzone's mechanical workshop to produce 100 mobile boxes that were to be placed in the stations of the main railway lines of the Kingdom of Italy.

In 1906 in Italy there were 20,530 fixed and 6942 mobile boxes, used in stations, on trains, on trams, steamers and hotels. In the First World War, special post offices accompanied the troops to the front with the appropriate mailing boxes. After the referendum that sanctioned the passage from the monarchy to the Republic, in 1946, the post office removed the emblem of the Kingdom of Italy from the mailboxes. Between 1957 and 1959 a new model arrives designed for the army of motorists of the cities who can post letters without getting out of their vehicle. Since 1965, however, the post has been traveling in special boxes attached to the sides of trams and buses. Between 1961 and 1965 the boxes with two slits arrive, which allow to separate the mail directed to the city from that directed elsewhere.

In 1967 the presenter Corrado emerged from a mailbox in a commercial intended to make the Cap known to Italians: for this campaign Poste involved testimonials such as Gianni Boncompagni, Raffaella Carrà, Gino Bramieri and Ugo Tognazzi.