Album Plate – Richard-Ginori

Plate from the Richard-Ginori Photographic Archive Album, no. 53, page 19 recto. The plate depicts a five-piece children’s table service produced at the Doccia manufactory, particularly significant for its “colonial” themed decoration. The imagery, applied to the essential and linear “Silvana” shape – attributed to Alfred Brown and characteristic of production in the fourth decade – helped to render a colonial imaginary familiar and everyday, in line with the regime’s aim of transmitting such narratives to younger generations.

Applied arts thus assumed a role comparable to that of children’s literature and school curricula, functioning as instruments of propaganda and vehicles for shaping the colonial consciousness of Fascist youth – who were themselves the subject of other Ginori services (as in the case, for example, of the “Balilla” decoration).