Tales of a blog renamer

I have a MySQL database like this:

create table t (item int, attr int);
insert into t values (1, 1), (1,2), (2,1), (2,3), (3,2), (3,3), (4,1), (4,2);

I need to find items with a list of attributes, ie show me all items that have 1 and 2 or 1 and 3 or 1, 2, and 3, etc.

The answer was an inner join:

select t1.item
from t t1
inner join t t2 on t1.item=t2.item AND t2.attr=2
where t1.attr = 1;

So, the first criteria appears in the where clause. Subsequent criteria appear in the inner join condition which it turns out is treated as basically another where clause. The results are pared down by items that appear in both lists only. (Duh, that's an inner join!) Can you tell I'm no good at SQL? :(

There may be a better way to do this (group by?) but I hope this is reasonably optimized.

EDIT: The query does indeed seem nicely optimized when you create a unique index on item and attr:

alter table t add unique (item, attr);

Explain now shows:

id	select_type	table	type	possible_keys	key	key_len	ref	rows	Extra
1	SIMPLE	t2	index	item	item	10	NULL	6	Using where; Using index
1	SIMPLE	t1	ref	item	item	10	builds.t2.item,const	2	Using where; Using index

So, the index is used in 1, which results in a constant getting plugged in to the second part (and the index is used again). Spiff.