Three drilling derricks, one drawn black and solid in the foreground, two fading into grey behind it, all three rising out of a refinery drawn as pure silhouette. The slogan across the top says what the picture is for: «PER L’AUTARCHIA DEL MINERALE» — for the self-sufficiency of the mineral.
The AGIP roundel sits top left, the letters interlocked inside a double circle. At the foot, spelled out in full, the company: AZIENDA GENERALE ITALIANA PETROLI — A.G.I.P. And tucked into the black silhouette at lower right, a lozenge with a second name inside it: ROMSA. The drawing is all verticals — lattice towers, guy wires, chimneys — and it sells not a product but an activity: drilling, at home, for oil the country did not want to import.
The state in the oil business
AGIP was founded in 1926 by the will of the Mussolini government: a state oil company for a country with, as far as anyone then knew, hardly any oil. Its job was the whole chain — exploration, refining, distribution — and in the sanctions years after 1935 the exploration side acquired a propaganda value out of proportion to its results: every derrick drawn or photographed was an argument that fuel autarky was possible. The company outlived the regime that created it by half a century; from 1953 it belonged to Eni, whose six-legged dog eventually replaced the interlocked letters on the service stations, and the AGIP name was wound down from the late 1990s.
Reading the marks
The ROMSA lozenge printed in the corner ties the sheet to AGIP’s refining side; the collector expands the acronym as Raffineria di Olii Minerali S.A., a reading we have not been able to check against an independent source, so here it stays what it is on the paper: a second mark beside the first. In the lower left corner there is also the small circular monogram with «MILANO» beneath it that recurs across this whole advertising series — the agency’s mark, which the collector reads as IGAP, the Milanese advertising concessionaire. The monogram is too small on the scan to confirm, and the sheet is published without an attribution or a date; the slogan places it squarely in the autarky drive of the late 1930s.
About this image. The work is still protected by copyright: under Italian law (L. 633/1941) rights run for 70 years from the death of the author. Since the author has not been identified, that term cannot be considered expired, and the image is treated as fully protected. It is reproduced here for documentation, study and critical purposes only, under Art. 70 of L. 633/1941 and the fair-use provision of 17 U.S.C. §107. The scan was made by the collector from his own copy of the sheet, part of the period material he keeps in a private archive: owning the physical sheet is not the same as holding the rights to the work. The image is not offered for sale, no reproduction rights are granted, and any request concerning the work should be addressed to the rights holders. Cultural Heritage Online publishes this material to document it, with no celebratory intent; see our terms and the DMCA contact published there.
Sources
- AGIP — foundation in 1926 by the Mussolini government, refining and distribution, absorption into Eni
- The sheet itself, for the slogan, the AGIP roundel, the ROMSA lozenge and the agency monogram.
