1869 Italy Cover Tied To US Stamp.

Hey everyone. I have this cover w/letter sent from Italy, but a US stamp was used to pay the fee. I'm not really sure, but is that a New York Harbor pm?

Also, wouldn't 2c be quite cheap for a letter from Italy to the US?

Thank you

The letter did not enter the mail stream in Italy (actually the Roman States as this was before unification) and was sent via a forwarding agent in NYC (Austin Baldwin & Co). The forwarding agent applied the 2 cent stamp to pay the drop letter rate and mailed the letter in NYC

Sorry, could you elaborate a bit on a forwarding agent? It looks like it was sent via a bank in Florence to a forwarding agent in NY.
Is it like a "postage due", where the recipient had to pay the fees?
Was it customary for international banks to offer this service, and have a working relationship with private American firms?
How did the international fees get bypassed?
I don't understand the process here.

Unlike government postal services, where we have published laws and regulations setting rates and procedures, we don't know that much about forwarding agents. Different forwarding agents probably did things differently, so we can only conjecture how it probably worked. The sender somehow got the letter from Rome to Maquay and Pakenham, a forwarding agent in Florence. The letter could have been hand carried, or it could have been part of a bundle of letters mailed to Florence. Maquay and Pakenham sent the letter, probably bundled with other letters to Austin Baldwin & Co, another forwarding agent in New York. The two forwarding agents probably had a financial relationship with Austin charging the postage to Maquay's account. Maquay probably charged something to the sender.

Was it routed through Queenstown or was that a ship?

The sender endorsed the letter to be routed via Queenstown (now Cobh, Ireland). The forwarding agent would typically have better knowledge of sailing schedules than a sender and might ignore the endorsement if another route was faster or cheaper.

For this letter, it was almost certainly sent via Queenstown. There were two sailings that stopped in Queenstown (Cunard Tarifa on February 10 and Inman City of Antwerp on February 11) that both arrived in NYC on February 24 (the date of the Austin Baldwin marking)

That is incredible sleuth work, SPQR! For something that "we don't know much about", you sure know a lot about.
It's very interesting.. Maquay & Pakenham was a bank in Florence, and Austin Baldwin a shipping company.
I wonder (and this is just a theory) if there was also a money order enclosed in the envelope to her dear sister, which is why the bank personally sent it rather than entrusting it to a mail carrier.

Otherwise, I don't see any reason why she wouldn't just go to a post office, or why the bank wouldn't redirect her to one.
I have some other letter from this family and they seem to travel quite a bit, so I think they come from lots of money.

Do we have anything like a forwarding agent today?

Solomons prayer, I subscribe to an English railway magazine. It is mailed from a forwarding company in Belgium or Sweden by airmail in bulk, which saves quite a bit of postage


Peter

Maquay & Pakenham is listed as a forwarding agent in the book by Rowe Postal History and Markings of the Forwarding Agents, I don't know if they were also a bank. There is really no way to know why the sender used a forwarding agent for a personal letter. Typically forwarding agents were used for business correspondence. Saving a few cents on a single letter might not be worth the effort, but if you are a business sending 100 letters at a time the savings adds up. The sender might have had a stack of business correspondence and just added the personal letter to the bundle.

Note also that the sender was in Rome which was still an independent state with the rest of the peninsula unified into Italy. I believe that by February 1869, the only postal route with Rome was via the North German Union, so the route via Queenstown might have been faster.

As Peter noted, there are still re-mailing services today that will ship mail in bulk to be mailed at lower rates.

That's incredible. You sure enlightened me today!
Thank you so much for the incredible responses, and the history lesson!