"You know youÂre olde when..." . . . your mind becomes cluttered with information of consequence to only polite, patient young people. Upon being apprised of the true nature of the solar system by an amazed Watson who has just learned that Holmes did not know this simple fact of physics: "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." "To forget it!" "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it." digitS' scratching noggin while trying to forget and remember at the same time

Two good books which have many varieties (no book has them all): Carolyn J. Male, 100 Heirloom Tomatoes for the American Garden Amy Goldman, The Heirloom Tomato: From Garden to Table ========== You may also want to look at tomato databases such as: Tatiana's TomatoBase -- 2,537 open-pollinated cultivars, no hybrids; usually multiple comments and pics: http://tatianastomatobase.com/wiki/Main_Page Cornell's Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners -- 764 popular varieties, both hybrids and open pollinated; brief info: http://vegvariety.cce.cornell.edu/mainSearch/showAll.php?searchCriteria=tomato&searchIn=0amp;ID=&refineByID=&sortBy=variety&order=ASC&subSort=Update+Results Dave's tomato page -- many, many varieties for the home gardener, but not much info: http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/finder/cultivars.php?sname=Tomatoes&choice=A NC State's tomato lists -- mostly commercial varieties, but many are grown by home gardeners: http://cuke.hort.ncsu.edu/cucurbit/wehner/vegcult/vgclintro.html Vent Marin's Passion Tomates (if you read French) -- 12,563 varieties, with varying amounts of info: http://cuke.hort.ncsu.edu/cucurbit/wehner/vegcult/vgclintro.html Heirloom Vegetable Archive -- a few hundred (?) varieties; brief info with very helpful pics: http://sev.lternet.edu/~jnekola/Heirloom/tomatoesA.htm Tolle Tomaten (if you read German) -- list of varieties; also a search engine with links to other tomato databases: http://www.tolletomaten.de/index.php Tomato Site -- factual info about 200+ popular varieties, mostly OPs, about half with photos: http://www.tomatosite.com/index.php?PR=_listat_pr&NT=Database&NS=Alphabetical_List

That's not much to go on. Could you post a photo? How tall, how wide, where did you get it and when? Thus far, it's blue and made in the Soviet Union.

I peeked at the numbers on the bottom, and they are just fuzzy enough that I can't make out a date. I don't know about Italy, but in most other parts of Western Europe, a handwritten seven has a slash through it. I'm wondering if what you're interpreting as 1741, isn't 1941 instead. Then again, patterns are sometimes identified through numbers, instead of names. My formal Bavarian China doesn't have a 'name'. It's not typically imported into the U.S., and is simply identified by a number. Since it has the word Italy, and not Italia, I presume it was meant for export to an English speaking country. Actually, the pieces have enough variance in the tolerances of the tops, they look handworked and perhaps joined to a slip cast bottom. I'd call them more 'primitive' than crude. Perhaps produced in a smaller cottage industry shop. They proliferated in many pottery producing areas. I know jack poo about Italian pottery, but also think they're newer than 75 years. And are very pleasant pieces. The thing about 'dating' older pieces by relating them to an ancestor. Just because you can link them to a person who is the equivalent of a great grandparent in age, doesn't date that object to the same era. My great-grandfather was born before the Civil War, but I assume he was still purchasing new items well into the 1940s.