Negotiating the Gold Standard: The Geographical and Political Construction of Gold Fineness in Twentieth-Century Italy

Some tourists pursue bargains, others authenticity. Those who choose Italy as their destination expect to find both as they stroll the streets of Rome, Florence, or Venice. Few resist the temptation to bring home considerable booty, often including gold and silver jewelry. But much of the jewelry tourists buy in the showcase cities of Venice and Florence is actually made in towns where tourists rarely venture: Valenza Po in Piedmont, Vicenza in the Veneto, and Arezzo in Tuscany. The fact that their jewelry is not "authentically" Florentine or Venetian might not disconcert the majority tourists, but the possibility of being cheated on its fineness—that is, the amount of pure gold it contains—certainly would.

The grade of gold jewelry is usually measured in carats: 24 carats denote pure gold, 18 carats denote an alloy that contains three parts of gold out of four, and so on. In the metric system, employed for most official uses in continental Europe, the grade of gold jewelry is expressed in millesimals. An alloy containing three parts gold in four is said to be 750-millesimal gold, which corresponds to 18 carats. On the basis of a law enacted in 1934, Italian jewelry must carry the hallmark of the maker (a number followed by the province where the company is located) and a number specifying the fineness of the alloy used ("750" for 18-carat jewelry). A whole bureaucracy presides over the enforcement of this standard, and—at least on paper—frauds are severely punished. Yet, as we shall see, many a tourist has discovered the hard way how far removed theory may be from practice in Italy.

The explosion of mass tourism was only one of the factors in the international success of Italian jewelry after World War II. Regular exports also skyrocketed after the mid-1950s, rising with few interruptions from almost nothing in 1950 to the equivalent of more than 300 tons of pure gold in the mid-1990s. ¹ Since the early 1960s Italy has been the largest producer and exporter of gold jewelry in the world, and the share of both the Italian and the international markets held by the three jewelry towns named earlier has increased relentlessly. This success, however, is something of a paradox. Gold mining is virtually nonexistent in Italy, and the precious metal processed by the Italian firms follows long and winding paths that originate in South Africa and radiate from the Swiss banks. ² From the 1930s to 2000, the Italian state held a monopoly on the importation of gold. ³ Yet vast amounts of the metal were smuggled into the country to evade both customs duties and sales taxes. This illicit trade fueled thriving informal economies at both local and global levels. ⁴ Smuggling of gold and finished jewelry, tax evasion, and the violation of labor laws wove extensive webs of complicity linking local communities, the Italian state, and global traders.

Despite (or maybe because of) the pervasiveness of informal relations in the Italian gold jewelry industry, throughout the 1950s and 1960s industrialists, artisans, traders, and politicians spent a remarkable portion of their public life debating the details of the fineness standards. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct this debate, not only for the insights it offers into the economic and political negotiations that informed Italy's postwar economic "miracle" but also because the controversies over gold fineness highlight features of technical standards usually neglected by scholars. As far as Italy's economic history is concerned, the construction of the fineness standards provides a fairly typical illustration of the ways in which many towns in the so-called third Italy negotiated with the state and international markets to turn the ties of locality into a source of global competitiveness. ⁵ More generally, this story shows how technical standards are defined in...