Italian gold coin ?

[sterlingstacker]

Good evening, 

As above I am trying to identify a very small gold coin in my stack as shown below:

Sovereign used for scale, 

All I have been able to gleam is the date 1918 and similar coins where struck in Eritrea but much larger and silver essentially a Thaler. 

 

Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated 

 

Thank you for reading.

 

Regards,

SS

Edited April 1 by sterlingstacker

[Petra]

Close up? What’s it say round edge?

[sterlingstacker]

This 

[dicker]

I wasn’t aware golf was a thing in Italy.  🙂

[Xander]

9 minutes ago, dicker said:

wasn’t aware golf was a thing in Italy.  🙂

Maybe it's a Birdie.

[Petra]

There appears to be only silver Thalers that look like this… what’s on the other side?

[refero]

[CollectForFun]

10 hours ago, sterlingstacker said:

This 

Is this the close-up of the actual small gold coin please, or just a pic of the standard silver thaler version of the coin used for illustration?

[sterlingstacker]

3 hours ago, CollectForFun said:

Is this the close-up of the actual small gold coin please, or just a pic of the standard silver thaler version of the coin used for illustration?

The latter, I am just out a the moment and will post better pics of both sides when I get back.

Edited April 1 by sterlingstacker

[CollectForFun]

Thanks, I was mainly wondering if such signs of circulation are on your coin, as that would be surprising. It's indeed an interesting coin, I've never seen such gold version of this coin yet. Do you remember where you acquired it from?

My first guess is that it's one of those modern miniature gold reproductions of famous historic coins (or else you have something quite unique 🙂). As I said, I'm not aware such coin originally existed - there was no reason nor use for it. Also, a gold coin of such a small size would be extremely unusual for early 20th century Europe.

The silver version of the coin was produced as an equivalent of Maria Theresia taler. Here is a short summary of the background of its production (as well of its predecessor): https://en.sewasew.com/p/tallero-eritreo. In brief, Italians were not very successful with any of their versions, due to which the next time they had expansion plans in Eritrea, they borrowed actual Maria Theresia taler dies from Austrians and started minting them in Rome in mid-30s...

[refero]

there are not gold version of this coin as far as i m aware.