These postcards of the ancient landmarks of Rome were created using the Photochrom process, which adds precise gradations of artificial color to black and white photos. Invented by Swiss printer Orell Gessner Fussli, the process involved creating lithographic stone from the negatives—Up to 15 different tinted stones could be involved in the production of a single picture, but the result was remarkably lifelike color at a time when true color photography was still in its infancy.

The Library of Congress hosts forty eight of these images in their online catalog, all downloadable as high quality jpegs or tiffs. In most of these images—with their otherworldly coloration—we can imagine Rome the way it looked not only in 1890, but also how it might have looked in the 17th and 18th centuries—and to passionate Romantic poets in the early 19th, a place of raw natural grandeur and sublime man-made decay. See the Library of Congress online catalog to view and download all forty-eight of these postcards.