Ferdinando (Nando) Salce (1878‒1962) was born in Treviso into a wealthy family of fabric traders. Already as a young man he began collecting posters: he bought his first one – Società Anonima Incandescenza a Gas brevetto Auer, a work by Giovanni Maria Mataloni (1869‒1944) – at the early age of seventeen, which from the very beginning demonstrates his refined qualities of a connoisseur. In his lifetime, Salce managed to collect as many as 24,580 pieces which in 1961 he left as a bequest to the Italian state. Nowadays, the rich collection is housed in a special museum in Treviso (Museo nazionale Collezine Salce) which in 2017 was allocated space in complex of the church of San Gaetano, not far from Salce's home.
The current exhibition presents a selection of fifty-two posters which geographically cover the territory of the present-day Republic of Slovenia and originate from the time between 1910 and 1960.
In terms of content, they can be divided into several groups: tourist posters which promote Slovenia, its natural beauties, spas and tourist resorts; the next group consists of posters promoting different events, such as fairs, cultural and sports events, various congresses and meetings of interest associations; in the last group there are commercial posters, such as advertisements for hats, washing powder, beer, newspaper, etc.
The designs of the selected exhibited posters display a wide range of stylistic expression: from Liberty to Fauvism, from echoes of Cubism to Expressionism, from the New-Objectivity to Constructivism.
The posters bear inscriptions in different languages, particularly the ones that were meant to promote the Ljubljana Grand Fair and various tourist resorts. It is interesting to follow the presentation of Slovenia which used to be part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and later the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, yet its name sometimes appears independently on the posters and sometimes it was made clear that the country belonged within the framework of the Yugoslav state. Another interesting matter is to follow the variants of the names of places that were under the Italian rule between the two wars (e.g. Postojna can be seen named on the posters as Adelsberg, Postoina, Postumia).
Last but not least, the authors of the posters should be mentioned. The oldest were produced by three Triestini who were still under the influence of Liberty style – Argio Orell (1884‒1942), Ugo Flumiani (1876‒1938) and Glauco Cambon (1875‒1930) – and by the Austrian Franz Lenhart (1898‒1992), who naturalized in Italy and was a splendid designer and promoter of famous mountain resorts in the Dolomites (Cortina d’Ampezzo, Madonna di Campiglio). Most prominent of the Slovenian designers of the exhibited posters are Ivan Vavpotič (1877‒1943), painter, illustrator and theater designer, Peter Kocjančič (1895‒1986), also a renowned photographer, then printing master Evgen Šajn, architects Herman Hus (1896‒1960) and Janko Omahen (1898‒1980), both students of Jože Plečnik (1872‒1957), painter and printmaker Božidar Jakac (1899‒1989), the first dean of the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, then Ivan Pengov (1906‒1975) of versatile talents, painter Rudi Gorjup (1916‒2001), and the splendid representative of the applied graphic arts Janez Trpin (1908‒1973).