Buon Ricordo Plates: Collectible Italian Ceramics That Started as a Marketing Tool

For his 73rd birthday in April, Felice Macchi had lunch at La Bettola Del Gusto, a restaurant in Pompeii, Italy, with a give attention to seafood.

He ordered the home specialty: spaghettoni, a thicker spaghetti, in a fermented anchovy sauce with black truffles and butter made with milk from water buffalo native to the Mediterranean area. The meal got here on a ceramic plate with a whimsical hand-painted design depicting the spaghettoni dish and a smoking volcano, a nod to close by Mount Vesuvius.

Mr. Macchi completed his meal — he stated it was “glorious” — however didn’t go away the restaurant empty-handed. As an alternative of leftovers, he took dwelling the plate his pasta was served on.

It was a brand new addition to a set he has amassed of that sort of Italian tableware, often called Buon Ricordo plates. He has a whole lot of them, lots of which he eats on. Others beautify hallways, the kitchen and the eating room of his dwelling in Varese, Italy.

Since 2022, Mr. Macchi has been the president of the Buon Ricordo Plate Collectors Affiliation. The group, which has about 400 members in Europe and South America, is planning an exhibition of the plates on the Fondazione Sant Elia, a museum in Palermo.

When requested why he began accumulating the plates, Mr. Macchi, an insurance coverage agent, answered romantically.

“Why can we fall in love with a lady?” he stated.

The tableware was launched as a advertising and marketing device for an affiliation of regional Italian eating places, referred to as the Buon Ricordo Union, fashioned in 1964. It will probably nonetheless be discovered on the union’s eating places — in addition to at Italian flea markets and vintage sellers, design commerce exhibits like Maison et Objet in Paris and high-end décor shops like ABC Carpet & Residence in New York.

On the time the plates had been launched, native Italian cuisines had been principally ready at dwelling and largely seen as unfit of serving at eating places throughout Italy, lots of which had French-influenced menus as a substitute.

The thought for Buon Ricordo, which interprets to “good reminiscence” in English, got here from Dino Villani, an Italian promoting government who, amongst different accomplishments, based the sweetness contest now often called Miss Italy. He proposed the restaurant union as a strategy to promote and protect regional Italian cooking at institutions within the nation.

Restaurant house owners who needed to affix needed to present that they had been utilizing regional recipes and elements. Becoming a member of the union has additionally required an annual price; this 12 months, it was 1,000 euros. Within the Nineteen Eighties, it began to just accept eating places outdoors of Italy that adhered to its membership standards.

As soon as a part of the union, institutions acquired distinctive tableware designed to spotlight their signature dishes, with every restaurant’s plate that includes its title and a hand-painted motif that always included cartoonish renderings of swordfish, rabbits, snails, cows or squid.

When a patron ordered a restaurant’s signature dish, it was served on a Buon Ricordo plate, which could possibly be taken dwelling as a memento — a observe that has roughly continued to at the present time on the union’s 112 eating places, 11 of that are outdoors of Italy, in cities together with Paris, Tokyo and New York. (Nowadays, patrons of the eating places obtain the plates provided that they order the home specialty as a part of a multicourse Buon Ricordo tasting menu.)

Suki LaBarre, the vp of merchandising and e-commerce at ABC Carpet & Residence, stated the shop began carrying the plates in 2022; at first, it provided a small choice of about 50 items that she and a colleague selected after contemplating numerous designs for greater than an hour. Final 12 months, she ordered some 600 extra plates for the shop from a provider that makes a speciality of midcentury European ornamental objects.

“We’ve gone with the fish tales and never a lot the meat,” Ms. LaBarre stated of the kinds of motifs on the plates bought at ABC, which value $60 a plate. She attributed the curiosity within the type partly to its playful aesthetic and partly to its historical past.

Daniele Tassi, 36, purchased a number of plates at ABC in February to make use of as décor at his Italian restaurant Terre, in Brooklyn. “I used to be stunned to see them there — however I perceive why they’re,” stated Mr. Tassi, the chef at Terre, which he co-owns with Monia Solighetto and Alessandro Trezza, a married couple with Milanese roots.

In January, Terre turned the primary and solely member of the Buon Ricordo Union in america. Ms. Solighetto, 49, stated she needed to affix the union as a result of it stands for Italy’s custom of “consuming domestically and utilizing high quality, seasonal elements” — a practice, she added, that’s now additionally “fashionable.”

At Terre, the signature dish is pappardelle pasta with a wild boar ragù, a household recipe Mr. Tassi was served usually when he was rising up in Italy’s Umbria area. Apart from the boar meat, which comes from Texas, the dish at Terre is made utilizing elements from Italy.

It’s served on Buon Ricordo plates with a design depicting the Italian and American flags and a grey boar standing in a coil of yellow pasta. They had been produced at a manufacturing facility in Vietri sul Mare, on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, which has been utilizing native clay to make the tableware because it was launched six many years in the past.

On April 9, the Buon Ricordo Union had a dinner to have a good time its sixtieth anniversary in Vietri sul Mare. A particular plate was issued for the event, and cooks from some 100 related eating places ready a tasting menu. They included Mr. Tassi, who stated he returned to Brooklyn after the occasion with dozens of Buon Ricordo plates; he picked up some from his grandparents, who had collected the tableware within the ’70s and ’80s, a time when curiosity in it was surging in Italy.

Mary Lies, 60, has been a fan of the plates ever since she seen some at an antiques honest in Lucca, Italy, within the early 2000s. She has since been shopping for the tableware for herself and for her retail enterprise, Mercato, in Kansas Metropolis, Kan., which sells it for $37 a plate.

Ms. Lies described the ceramics as a kind of on the spot temper lifter.

“Seeing them, you possibly can’t assist however smile,” she stated.