Transport

Vespa is an Italian brand of scooters and mopeds manufactured by Piaggio. The name means “wasp” in Italian. The Vespa has evolved from a single model motor scooter manufactured in 1946 by Piaggio & Co. S.p.A. of Pontedera, Italy to a full line of scooters and one of seven companies today owned by Piaggio.

In 2024, San Marino and Italy celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Vespa Club d’Italia (created 1949), the largest Italian association that promotes Vespa riding in its many forms : sporting, tourist, cultural, recreational. Both stamps, with different designs, were issued on April 20, 2024. In the San Marino stamp, the Vespa license plates refer to the day of issue, respectively “20.04” and “2024”. This is very unusual to discover the exact date of issue printed directly on the stamp. Italian stamps were issued in panes of 45, while San Marino issued a miniature sheet of 4 stamps (First information provided by Enzo Cafaro, Italy).

China (PR), Hong Kong and Macau celebrated on September 7, 2023, the 10th anniversary of the Belt and road Initiative (BRI) with one stamp for China and a souvenir sheet each for the two other postal administrations. The Chinese stamps were issued in miniature sheets of 8 [4×2] or 12 [3×4] stamps with colored margins. As such this issue can be considered as a Dependency Parallel issue [PD]. Additionally, the three post offices created a booklet containing the two souvenir sheets and a miniature sheet of 4 Chinese stamps [2×2] with white margins. The Macau and Hong Kong souvenir sheets from this booklet have an additional white margin of about 6 mm on the left sign, and therefore can be differentiated from the original isolated souvenir sheets. The amount of 141,400 booklets was printed and redistributed to the different post offices. These booklets bear on the back cover a code number starting with the letter A, B or C, corresponding respectively to the Chinese, Hong Kong or Macau sales origin. Macau announced that they were attributed 15,000 samples but the allocation of the rest among China and Hong Kong is not known. With this booklet, this issue can be considered as Se-tenant and as such will be filed under the code [S20230907]. This is the 12th joint issue between these three postal administrations.