A brief history of the...Fornasetti plate

They're black and white and hung on walls across the world

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Who created them? Milanese artist and designer Piero Fornasetti, born in 1913. In his lifetime, he created more than 13,000 works - not all plates, either.

Who's the woman on all the plates? That would be Lina Cavalieri. She was a Roman-born opera singer during the Belle Epoque and was considered “the most beautiful woman in the world”. In 1952, Fornasetti was flipping through an early 19th-century magazine and was taken with a photograph of her.