Fire-marks
The Museum has an important collection of around 800 Fire-marks, a generous gift from collector Vito Platania, consisting of specimens produced by insurance companies that operated in Italy and Hungary over a century.
The fire-marks of Companies that operated in Italy and that Vito Platania donated to the Museum in 2008 are about 600. They are accompanied by 133 records in which the history of each insurance company is summarized with the date of foundation and any other significant corporate vicissitudes. A high-resolution reproduction of each plate is provided, also indicating its rarity: c = common; r = rare; rr = very rare; rrr = extremely rare.
In this way, a valuable document on the development of fire insurance in Italy was generated.
In 2012 Vito Platania also decided to donate his collection of fire-marks of Hungarian Companies of which he was a passionate scholar. Thus, another 200 plates, some of which are very rare, have been added to the previous ones and the Museum, thanks to the generosity of this collector, now has a truly enviable collection, entirely available to the public in the room that was dedicated to him and which bears his name.
This new collection of plates is illustrated in a volume that documents the development of fire insurance in Hungary.
Vito Platania
Dr Vito Platania (1927-2016) was born in Turin to an Italian father and Hungarian mother. From an early age he lived in Budapest where he attended school from primary school to university. In 1948, after two years under the Communist regime, he decided to interrupt his studies to return to Italy and continue them in Florence. He graduated in 1952 and worked for over thirty years at Fondiaria in Florence.
He began dealing with insurance fire-marks in 1988, travelling halfway across Italy to collect them himself, but always with the intention of eventually producing a systematic catalogue of Italian fire-marks as already existed in Great Britain and Germany.
The next step was to study the history of the insurance companies to which the collected fire-marks referred, and to do this he consulted the material of numerous libraries and state archives.
His catalogue of Le Targhe Incendio in Italia was published in 1997 in Florence and a second, expanded edition was printed in 2005. The latter was further enriched with new fire-marks with updates that the Museum makes available to the public.
Finally, Dr. Platania has completed a very valuable work of research and analysis entitled Handbook of Fire-marks in Hungary. This is - as can be seen by leafing through the volume - an exceptional and unique work in this particular sector, because it documents the history of all insurance companies involved in fire insurance business in Hungary and, therefore, also those whose fire-marks number has not been traced so far.
Born of Fire-marks
Fire-marks, the use of which dates back to the 17th century, were affixed above the entrances of insured houses to indicate to the firemen in charge which buildings they had to extinguish any fire, and only later, a couple of centuries later, did their function reduce to that of advertising the name of the insurance company.
In fact, at the origins of fire insurance, there was no public service for extinguishing fires, so it was the insurance companies themselves that had to provide it as they were most interested in limiting this damage.
For this purpose, private fire-fighting teams were set up to intervene in the first instance on buildings that were insured by the company for which they worked. The plaque - almost always made of printed tin - served precisely to identify who was responsible for this task.
The rarity of such a collection lies in the fact that this practice has long since fallen into disuse and consequently the availability of these plaques has become increasingly difficult.
Collectors' Circles
Club Italiano Collezionisti targhe incendio
Clube Chapas
Deutscher-Feuer-VersicherungsSchilder-Verein
The British Fire Marks Circle
New York City Fire Museum
