As regards the goldsmith reality of the time, the Roman jeweller Mario Masenza left, in 1950, on the pages of the magazine «Italia», a vivid testimony:
"during the last war, Italian jewelers were forced to suspend all activity; sales stopped, production stopped and our work was reduced to that of simple kidnappers of the same companies that belonged to us. But if idleness is the father of vices, it is also the father of reflection, and sometimes only through a suspension of one's work can one reach a fullness of analysis, I would even say a severity of self-criticism that is not possible during periods of activity. […] We no longer even realized that we had become stockbrokers and that only those who wanted to invest their savings in gold turned to us. Where had the traditions of the ancient Italian goldsmith's art gone? […] We had to go back to the past, we had to attempt a rapprochement between artists and jewelry. At first it was not easy."
The Italian goldsmith world, which until then had wearily carried forward a tradition that had long since been outdated, or had looked to the Viennese or French goldsmith productions of the early twentieth century , adopting their styles as a pure aesthetic fact, needed a substantial renewal. This, however, does not mean that up until the 1950s there were no Italian jewelers who created small goldsmith masterpieces. Just think of Mario Buccellati (Ancona, 1891 – Milan, 1965), the Milanese Alfredo Ravasco (Genoa, 1873 – Ghiffa, 1958) and Fulco di Verdura (Palermo, 1899 – London, 1978) who worked mainly abroad; all great masters of traditional goldsmithing, however.
Italian research jewellery, on the other hand, as Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi states , «reached its maturity» with informal art. The artists, working with gold, a shapeless, fluid and ductile material, shaped and transformed into uncontrollable manifestations of thought, found the same stimuli that they perceived in creating an informal work of art.
While Franco Solmi, quoting Lara Vinca Masini, speaks of contemporary jewellery when it participates in a cultural world in which it no longer expresses adherence to forms , languages or fashions dictated from above, and not debatable, but also the desecrating freedom of the individual: testimony at the same time of the obvious plurality of ideological and cultural lines and of a fragmentation of ideal values of which it is a question of recovering not the abstract unity but the dialectical and problematic sense that is at the basis of the new myths and new rites of today.