Francesco Matraire was a printer in Turin, notable as the designer and producer of the earliest postage stamps of Sardinia and later Italy.
Little is known of his life; his family is believed to have been from Nice originally, and his correspondence is mostly written in French.
But the report included a mention of an ongoing dispute over appropriate fees for engravers, so with only a couple months left before the stamps were to go on sale, the authorities turned to a local resource in the form of Matraire, whose prior experience was in labels for patent medicines and the general printing needs of Turin.
Matraire did not have facilities for recess printing, so his first stamps were produced by lithography, later (1855) switching to letterpress.
The authorities being concerned about forgery, he proposed the embossing that was used in the stamps of 1853 and thereafter.