I hope I haven't bothered you. I need help with these markets
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I tried using my head and searching on Google, but I still don't know what a regular Italian star is. Is it silver, plated, or some other metal? I'm suffering here.
Try to gently clean the areas with inscriptions.
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I’ve heard of people suffering for their art. But your case, where you are suffering for someone else’s is unusual.
Based on the available information Bart has told us where and how to look, no doubt mirroring his own searches. And you have come up with crickets.
What we know about the fork is there is a set of three initials “EMH” over the word “Italy” and on the other side of the tines’ base is a circle with a crown in it.
We know that the circled crown was frequently used as a silver mark usually for .800 silver unless a higher rating was stamped on the item. And because the country name is written in English not Italian the item was probably made for export — presumably to the US.
We also know the circled Crown was usually a first half 20th century mark so it is possibly silver exported by or under the auspices of Benito Mussolini prewar government.
EMH could be the maker, or more likely the wholesaler and shipper.
Fascism is very popular in America again among the Trump crowd. The term, which simply means “to bundle together”, had acquired opprobrium because the journalist who came up with it to describe the fairly sound idea of bringing all the Italian sovereign states after Garibaldi under a central government, backed Hitler, who had infact modelled his state on the Italian success. Today the Russians are collecting back together all the little European states, Stalin kept after WWII.
If it is silver it may well be sourced from the Oro alla Patria “Gold for the Fatherland”, a nationwide campaign organized in 1935, when Italians donated their gold and silver to the embargoed state. Apparently 115 tons of silver were collected.
This amount of silver tells us a little about the popularity or persuasiveness of the prewar government whose infrastructure expenses provided jobs where there has been none.
When Alexander the Great raided Darius II’s treasury he came up with 250 tons of Persian silver which enabled him to build an eponymous city in Egypt and all those temples modern day archeologists are so keen on including the Parthenon, widely considered the most famous. Dedicated to the goddess Athena and constructed between 447 and 432 BC, this Doric-style temple is a symbol of ancient Greece, democracy, and Western civilization, featuring white marble construction and detailed, artistic friezes. In fact it was a bank vault serving exactly the same purpose as the Bank of England in London today.
Mussolini came up with the idea of taking everybody’s gold and silver for his own use. It wasn’t original, Both Charles I and Oliver Cromwell fined members of the public found with silver which is why we have so little UK silver earlier than 1643.
So that’s all I know about your fork. The alternative theory, based on the use of the word “Italy” rather than “Italia” , is it is Hanau silver and so made in Germany and nothing to do with Italy pre or post that swinging couple. I refer to the lamppost/gas station thing rather than any of their personal proclivities.
CRWW
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