Ah! Interesting find! I can actually shed some light on these.
First of all these were privately minted by a company named "Numismatica Italiana" (which no longer exists). Collecting gold medals related to various events was very popular in Italy in the 60-80ies and was made primarily for investment purposes.
This company did unofficial medals for everything you could think of and in most cases they did different versions with varying gold weights. I had one for the same olympic but with 7gr of gold (attaching below an old photo, no longer have it).
Bottom line is, if you find similar medals they are worth their weight in gold but hold zero numismatic value. There is no collector market for them. None is or did fake them afaik.
Plenty of (now old or deceased) people thought these medals would be valuable in the future because of their "association" with these events (like the olympics).
I found an old catalogue from 1961 for this company.
In 1961 a round with 10gr of gold 900/1000 was sold for 11700 Italian Lire.
In 1961 a gold ounce was 35.31USD, so 10gr of 900/1000 were 10.217USD.
10.217USD in 1961 were around 6335 Italian Lire
So basically they had a 85% markup. Almost criminal!
(FYI average factory worker salary per month was around 50000 Lire in those years, so the coin would have costed about a quarter of it).
They can probably compare to rounds with very very high premiums you can find today.
Cheers
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Posted 05/18/2025 1:52 pm
