Catalog
1 Lira
| Issuer | Kingdom of Italy |
|---|---|
| Year | 1881-1882 |
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| Size | 75 × 43 mm |
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| Reverse description | At left, a vignette of Italia Turrita in profile facing right, rendered in light red-brown. At right, an encircled panel carries the legal anti-counterfeiting text. Interlaced knot-work ornaments frame the composition throughout, all in light red-brown, with the repeated denomination '1 Lira' reserved in white against the background. |
| Reverse lettering | 1 LIRA 1 La legge punisce i fabbricatori di biglietti falsi, chi li introduce e li usa nel Regno e chi, avendoli ricevuti per veri, li rimette in circolazione dopo conosciutane la falsità. (Translation: 1 LIRA 1 The law punishes the makers of counterfeit banknotes, those who introduce and use them in the Kingdom and those who, having received them as genuine, put them back into circulation after having discovered their falsity.) |
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| Comments |
Italy's earliest small-denomination treasury notes — the "biglietti di Stato" — were introduced in the early 1880s partly to replace worn fractional coinage that had effectively vanished from circulation, hoarded or exported as the silver content outpaced face value. The 1 Lira addressed a genuine transactional gap at the lowest end of everyday commerce.
The Officina Carte Valori at San Teodoro was the Italian state's own security printing facility, established to reduce foreign printing dependency — a politically sensitive issue for a kingdom barely two decades old. P#10 is among the first outputs from that domestic capability at this denomination.