The history of the origin of the mailbox is ambiguous and extremely confusing. Any historian will not undertake to concretize anything in it, because there are quite a lot of applicants for the title of the inventor of this postal accessory.
Portuguese history
The Portuguese insist on the right of the discoverers of the mailbox. In their opinion, this simple object is more than five hundred years old. In 1500, the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias was caught in a violent sea storm off the coast of South Africa, in which most of his crew and the captain were killed. The survivors decided to return home to Portugal, but before sailing, they described all their misfortunes 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, João da Nova, the captain of a ship sailing to India, landed 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 here. For a long time the old shoe "worked" as a mailbox, and now a huge stone monument-shoe is installed in its place.
Italian history
The Italians did not remain indifferent to mailboxes. According to historians in Florence, at the very beginning of the 16th century, wooden mailboxes were installed, which were nicknamed "tamburi". They were placed in crowded places - in squares and near the main church churches. The tamburi had a gap in the upper part, where an anonymous denunciation of the enemies of the state could be dropped unnoticed by others. It is said that it was this idea that inspired the idea of methods for collecting private letters from the French Count Renoir de Vilaye.
French history
According to some sources, the first French mailbox became public more than 360 years ago, as evidenced by the records in the old papers of the Paris city mail. By order of Louis XIV in 1653, a city post was created, the management of which was entrusted to Count Jean Renoir de Vilaye. In those days, the only city post office was allocated a small room for rent on the rue Saint-Jacques, where everyone could send a letter, having paid the postage in advance. The small size of the postal hall could hardly accommodate everyone, and the count decided to install additional mailboxes where letters could be put. In order for the letter to reach the addressee, it was necessary to pay a single tariff in advance. For this purpose, postage labels or "ribbon-like parcels" were issued, on which the date of payment of the postage was indicated. Such a label could be bought not only from a postal official at the royal court, but also in monasteries, from doormen, etc. These labels were attached to the letter so that the postal worker could easily separate them, leaving himself a kind of postal receipt for reporting.
