No car anywhere on the page. Alfa Romeo’s entry in the war series shows a radial aero engine with a single propeller blade rising out of it like an obelisk, the word VINCERE boxed in black above, the script wordmark and the laurel-ringed badge below.
The composition is the starkest of the group: engine, blade, word. The badge — the Visconti serpent and the red cross of Milan — is drawn small and precise, the one ornament allowed.
The racing house as engine works
Alfa Romeo, founded in Milan on 24 June 1910 as A.L.F.A. and renamed after Nicola Romeo took control in 1918, had belonged to the state through IRI since 1933 — kept alive, famously, more for its engineering prestige than its balance sheet. In the war years the Milan works’ central task was aero engines, and that is what this sheet pledges to the war effort: not the racing cars that made the badge famous, but the radials. Like its companions in the «Vincere» group — the word from Mussolini’s war declaration of 10 June 1940 — the sheet dates itself to the war years by its own vocabulary.
Marks
The collector attributes the sheet to Erberto Carboni, placing an EC monogram under the VINCERE box; no monogram resolves there on our scan, and the sheet is published without an attribution.
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.
