1677 Piastre - Real Or Fake?

I wouldn't be at all surprised if it were genuine.

I'm in possession of a coin that I reviewed years ago for a friend but decided it to be fake and tucked it away with my paperwork concerning the coin. Here it is several years later. I've attempted to follow the same internet path as before, only to find much info has evolved and it probably is authentic 1652 Masatihvsets. .

novice101,

Best to start your own thread with a few good photos.
John1

Here is an NGC AU-50 for almost $3000. https://www.ebay.com/itm/274906827310. Some others on ebay look like a stock picture or perhaps fakes since they are all worn identical. Cool coin! thanks for sharing.

The spacing of the reverse legend is curious to me. See how the cross breaks the word DILECTVS in the reverse legend? Looking at other examples of this coin (Google Image search for "Tuscany piastre 1677") and I'm seeing numerous varieties: DIL-ECTVS and DILEC-TVS being common, as is unbroken DILECTVS with the cross disappearing behind the lettering - so there must have been plenty of dies made for these coins. But this coin is unique: DI-LECTVS, with the "L" distorted to fit, as if it were placed in afterthought. It looks like the die-cutter for this coin forgot to add the letter "L" to the word until after he'd finished, and there wasn't space to squeeze it in above the cross, so squeezed it in underneath.

That funny-shaped "L' drew my eye at first glance, because I'd normally take mis-shapen letters to be a sign of a cheap Chinese fake, but in this case, I can imagine a perfectly valid reason for it being like that. I'd lean towards "genuine", even without the SG test results.

The hole kills the value from what it might have attained otherwise, and makes it ungradable, but still a very nice, appealing coin.

Also leaning toward genuine. Though @sap's point is well-taken. I also looked at 1676 and could not find a reverse with that break in the lettering (thinking maybe an older reverse die got paired with a current obverse). Another impression is the dentils look a bit off, maybe a bit widely spaced? But the other design elements all look good to me.

Here is mine:



Always tough to assess the value of a holed coin. Without the hole, yours would have been in exceptional condition. Mine was $280 in 2015. I would guess yours would fetch at least that much if genuine.


I usually figure a holed example of an otherwise interesting coin might get 20-30% of the value of an unholed example.

If you like religious (Christian) imagery on your coins, 17th century Italy is the place to look. Ranaissance/baroque engravers seemed to use the large format of those Papal and Tuscan piastres like a painter used a canvas.

Doubling is common on certain Renaissance and early-Modern European coins, depending on method of manufacture. This was the era when old-fashioned big-guy-with-a-hammer minting technology was being replaced with newfangled machinery, and some of those new machines operated quite differently to the standard screw-press that eventually became industry standard. The rocker press and roller press, as two examples, were used to create multiple coins from a single "striking", and often caused doubling as the coin passed under the dies several times to attain the full strike. Pine Tree shillings were apparently made on a rocker press.

The roller press in particular operated in a similar way to an "elongated penny" souvenir-maker, with the blank strip being fed into a roller bearing the coin dies, and finished coins then punched directly out of the metal strip. Roller presses were "poor" technology in that the dies were usually far more prone to cracking, and if one of the dies on the barrel cracked, then all the dies had to be thrown away, since they were all attached to each other on the same barrel. It was this wastage, as well as other issues such as a tendency to jam, and difficulty in ensuring the dies always lined up properly, that spelled the doom for the roller press.

Look on your coin, at the far left of the obverse. See the ring of denticles, then a single "dot", then another ring of denticles that seems to curve the other way, out of the flan? That looks to me like the dies from the "next" coin, clipping a little onto this coin. Which indicates to me that this coin was probably made on a roller press.