ROME (Reuters) -Italy’s government has withdrawn two new stamps depicting natural landmarks of the bilingual South Tyrol province, in the north of the country, because they did not have inscriptions in German.
The stamps were due out on Tuesday but were withdrawn before they went on sale, a spokesman for the industry ministry said.
The missing translation breached an article of the Italian constitution which protects linguistic minorities, the ministry said in a statement, calling it an “anomaly” and ordering both an investigation into the apparent oversight and a new bilingual version.
The ministry also took down the webpage that showed the offending stamps.
South Tyrol, a mountainous area bordering Austria that once belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, became part of Italy after World War I.
Its population was forcibly “Italianised” under fascist leader Benito Mussolini, provoking local resentment and separatist sympathies that linger to this day.
The province, known as Suedtirol in German and Alto Adige in Italian, enjoys a large degree of autonomy and is fully bilingual. German, however, is spoken far more widely than Italian.
The withdrawn stamps showed the Catinaccio massif, or Rosengarten, and the Latemar mountain range in the Dolomites, as part of a series dedicated to mountains, parks and lakes across Italy.
Stamps with design errors can become collectable. One famous Italian example is the so-called “Gronchi Rosa”, a 1961 stamp withdrawn on the day it was issued because it had a map of South America with the wrong borders between Peru and Ecuador.
(Reporting by Alvise Armellini, editing by Giulia Segreti and Aidan Lewis)
