A tyre rolls up the narrow page past a comet-tailed star, the word VINCERE cuts across its tread, and at the foot sits the wordmark with the famous long-stemmed P. Nothing else: in the war series, the product and the watchword are the whole message.
The drawing gives the tyre the treatment the 1938 campaign reserved for eagles and statues — monumental scale, dramatic diagonal, a sky with stars. The tread pattern is drawn with care; it is, after all, the thing being sold, or rather the thing being pledged.
Rubber at war
Pirelli, the Milan rubber and tyre house listed on the exchange since 1922 and already then one of the world’s major tyre makers, appears twice in this collection: on the 1938 Gilera sheet, where «Gomme Pirelli» share credit for seventy racing victories, and here, alone, under the war watchword. The «Vincere» banners — the word Mussolini’s war declaration of 10 June 1940 ended on — converted each company’s peacetime identity into a war pledge; for a tyre maker, whose product moved every column on every front, the conversion required no drawing of guns at all. A tyre and a star sufficed.
Marks
The collector attributes the sheet to Erberto Carboni, reading an EC monogram near the upper star; no monogram resolves on our scan, and the sheet is published without an attribution. Dated by its series: after June 1940.
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.
