ollecting has always been a great passion involving, more or less intensely, all my family members.

My beloved dad dedicated all of his free time to stamps and postcards, and still today the results of his meticulous and constant search live in tidy presence into an armoire, in such a collections museum that my adolescence house has always been.

For a long time my sister has been filling her room with dolls coming from disparate countries dressed in traditional clothes.

My passion for caps began for fun, soon becoming overpowering, inexorably sweeping my two younger brothers, so creating a further tie among us.

Up to our first contact with another collector we used to live our innocent mania very reservedly, shyly conditioned by people used to judge with sarcasm those three thirty-years-old man gathering those “useless” objects which children used to play with in the years before economic well-being.

In the summer of 1990 we went to our first meeting: “Il Barattolo” is a breweriana club which yearly organizes its national assembly, and that year we found ourselves near Milano among tens of tables overflowing with cans, bottles, glasses and various objects, meanly related with beer.

We realized once more that our collecting item was considered the “Cinderella”, and us “crown- cappers” such as many never growing “Peter Pan”, underestimated by the professionals of that hobby-huckster.

Than I started imagining myself as a “canner”: I've always seen can coming as a danger for the crown caps future, so I doubt I've been objective, but the gaily-coloured tins certain charm was a mere trifle compared with the difficult placement of such a collection in a domestic ambient, and the thought to be chased out of house seemed not so attractive to me.
The large space availability request by cans sooner or later obliges to limit that collecting to few countries or subjects, and this clashes with my collecting concept: trading (even caps) with someone only interested in a selected samples sphere is not agreeable, ‘cause it automatically keeps you in inferiority in finding bits to offer in trade.

Labels are an appreciable item, some are very refined, and it's not so difficult to get them from breweries, since they consider them a good advertising gadget; you can easily keep them in few space and methodically, but I think that their various shape differences make this collection very heterogeneous, and they are paper made objects, after all…

Beer coasters passion is widely diffused; as much as labels they are easy to get from breweries, and the homogeneous shapes make the storing more rational, but their graphic quality comes often short of expectation: I thought it was not my kind.

I'm fascinate by glasses and old mechanic-capped bottles, but the problem of their fragility is added to can space difficulties: the beauty of the oldest samples, with all the history they testify, is out of doubt anyway!

Then, why did they look down on our beloved passion for crowns? Into a small metallic jewel is concentrated the synthesis of all the other objects in that meeting: often absolute artistic value graphic, reflecting styles and symbols typical to the different historical period every single piece belonged to, all this contained into a few centimetres thing having minimum dimension differences, easy and cheap to trade by mail, but meanly whose crowned form is simply…royal!!

Us poor amateur “cappers”, instead, just limited ourselves to profitable and free trades, and we even succeeded in remaining (or becoming) friends!

I like now to remember the great figure of Giorgio Gaiotto, who generously contributed in enriching our collection never profiting by our “novitiate”, unfortunately leaving this world before crown caps collecting began to loose its purity and trespass on marketing exceeds we are attending to on ebay today: his vivid memory reappears when we once again take a look on the nice caps outcome of our trades with him.

I affectionately greet all those (not many, really) collector friends present at our “initiation” which is, by now, part of (at least our) prehistory, light-years far from transformations that our hobby underwent by informatics coming.

I don't really want to criminalize the Internet, on the contrary, collecting profited by it under many point of view, but easy profits prospects make harder and harder to understand the real value of a crown cap, often sold as an absolute rarity by absurd prices, but owned in effects by the seller in hundreds of copies.

Series has always been one of the most appreciate section, and we often transformed ourselves in fanatic fruit juice consumer in order to find the missing piece: when the last puzzle dowel completed the work we were very satisfied, and I guess never anybody stopped a little to understand how much was finally cost the single set. Today we find ourselves to trade or buy very nice sets to discover then they were clamorous forgeries (the ill-famed “fake crowns”), expressly manufactured in order to worm a lot of money out of us, making almost all our certitude wavering.

It's up to us to avoid that things keep on making worse: try to give back to our dear caps their real significance, out of every economical valuation, being instead an irreplaceable occasion to aggregate fans from all over the world.

Lorenzo