Francesco Maria La Camera was born in Rome in 1944, graduated in civil engineering in 1968, is expert in designing road and held for nearly 50 years, his professional activity in this area.
Temperamentally curious and passionate in his life he has dedicated himself to study and improve many other areas of interest, most notably the MECCANO. And so, from an early age he dedicated a constant attention to the mechanical construction, modeling and construction toys, in short, to define him briefly, he was born with bolts in his hand!
Over the last 15 years he has addressed his passion to MECCANO, constructing, acquiring, cataloging, editing and restoring hundreds of models and boxes of construction toys from the main building houses born in the last century, from the recording (in 1901) of Hornby patent until the sixties, when the appearance on the market of plastics and electronics substantially supplanted metal construction toys.
He devoted himself to historical research, acquiring important pieces collected in every part of the globe finding the rarest and most expensive to give the most complete possible picture of this unique universe that has fueled the joy and imagination of generations of children around the world.
He has selected and cataloged all the historical retrieved data and, above all has made many models, has restored boxes, and rare or incomplete documents redefining them in detail (some examples? The exasperated search of the identical color and type of yarn which were tied to metal plates, or the cardboard of the same color and material composing the original!). The result, today, is a collection of an huge amount of beautiful objects (roughly 1,500 pieces) that are at the moment one of the most important – perhaps one of the most complete – collections of metal construction toys for kids in the world.