Corpo Nazionale dei Giovani Esploratori d’Italia — Marche Nazionaliste Serie XIV

The Corpo Nazionale dei Giovani Esploratori Italiani (CNGEI) — today Corpo Nazionale Giovani Esploratori ed Esploratrici Italiani — is Italy’s oldest surviving Scout association. It was founded on 30 June 1913 by Carlo Colombo, a Piedmontese doctor inspired by Baden-Powell, as a secular national youth movement. In 1915, as Italy entered the First World War, the CNGEI received high state patronage (Head of State and the ministries of Education, Foreign Affairs, Interior and Defence) and grew rapidly as a patriotic educational corps.

This set belongs to the commercial “Marche Nazionaliste” (nationalist poster stamps) published in Milan by U. Marucelli & C. Editori and marked Serie XIV (series 14), numbers 1–8, dated 1915. They are erinnofili / cinderellas: perforated advertising and propaganda labels with no franking value, sold to promote both the CNGEI and a civic message to Italian youth. Each stamp shows a boy scout of the Corpo Nazionale in a different pose — bugler, drummer, rifleman, staff bearer, cyclist and others — framed with the fleur-de-lis and motto “Sii preparato” (Be prepared), bilingual “Boy Scouts d’Italia,” and the tricolour slogan band “Giovani d’Italia! Praticate le virtù civili e sarete degni della patria” (“Youth of Italy! Practise civic virtues and you will be worthy of the fatherland”).

Serie XIV thus sits at the intersection of early Italian Scouting and wartime nationalist culture: it documents how the young CNGEI presented itself to the public in 1915, and how poster stamps carried scout imagery into shops, letters and albums long before modern membership magazines.