The history of the inbox is mixed and extremely confusing. Not a single historian will undertake to specify anything in it, because there are quite a lot of applicants for the title of inventor of this postage.
Portuguese history
The Portuguese insist on the right of the discoverers of the mailbox. In their opinion, this unpretentious subject is more than five hundred years old. In 1500, the Portuguese traveler Bartolomeu Dias fell into a fierce sea storm off the coast of South Africa, in which most of his crew and the captain himself died. The survivors decided to return home to Portugal, but before leaving, they described all their misadventures in a letter, which they put in an old shoe and hung on a tree. So they tried to tell their descendants about their fate, in case the entire expedition died. A year later, Juan da Nova, the captain of a ship sailing to India, docked on the South African coast and found this message in his shoe. In honor of the dead sailors, he built a chapel in this place, and later a settlement grew up here. For a long time the old shoe "worked" as a mailbox, and now in its place there is a huge shoe-monument made of stone.
Italian history
The Italians did not remain indifferent to the mailboxes. According to historians in Florence, at the very beginning of the 16th century, wooden mailboxes were installed, which they called the "vestibule". They were placed in crowded places - in squares and at the main church churches. The vestibules had a gap in the upper part, where anonymous denunciation of the enemies of the state could be omitted unnoticed by others. It is said that it was precisely this idea that prompted the idea of methods for collecting private letters from the French Count Renoir de Vilaye.
