Vatican Postmark Announcements Found

Recently, I drifted onto the Italian side of the Vatican City website. Much to my surprise, I stumbled onto a webpage that has several PDF files containing Vatican Post Office press releases. Unfortunately, they are written in Italian. However, using some of the recently released Microsoft AI translation tools, I have begun to read a few of these files. Surprisingly, the files contain first-day and special occasion postmark designs from 2001 to the current year. To me, this was a startling discovery because for some years I have been buying Vatican City stamps on envelopes, and every one of these covers has had the same type of round circle postmark (left figure below). I did not know the CFN was producing postmarks much like those found on commercially-produced first-day covers (right figure below). Many of the stamp/cache producers have gone out of business, mainly since 2010.    2020 Easter Postmark Left figure is standard round cancellation Right figure is also used by CFN Over the years, Vatican Notes regularly reported Vatican postmark information. Frederick I. Levitsky reported on “special” postmarks, until around 2008. Mr. Levitsky last column was in the Q1 2009 of Vatican Notes (he passed away in 2010). Nils Rundqvist reported on everyday postmarks until about 2003. Both men left the Vatican Philatelic Society with a substantial amount of information about Vatican City which forms much of postmark data which is on our website. Since Mr. Levitsky and Mr. Rundqvist reports ceased, there has been no organized effort to report postmark information. Until discovering this website, I did not know Vatican City postmark information was available. Now discovered, the current postmark information is being added to the VPS website. Here is how you get to it:       1. Sign on the VPS website (https://vaticanstamps.org )       2. Go to the Member Page       3. On the yellow banner, click on the Reference tab       4. From the drop-down, select the Postal Announcements menu option The Vatican Postmark Information page will then appear. Here you will see a series of links to PDF files containing postmark announcements. The Italian side are direct links to files on the Vatican City website. The English side are VPS translation files done through the help of Microsoft AI software. More files will be translated in the near future. 2024 Easter Postmark The next question is how to get covers with current postmarks. That question has been sent to the Vatican Post Office and it might take a while to get an answer.