1 Piastra - Clement XII

Clement XII, born Lorenzo Corsini, was already 78 years old and nearly blind when he ascended the papal throne in 1730 — yet his reign produced some of the most ambitious building projects in 18th-century Rome, funded in part by a controversial state lottery he legalized in 1731, the same year this piastra was struck. The lottery, essentially imported from Genoa, generated immediate revenue but drew sharp criticism from within the Curia.

The piastra was the prestige silver denomination of the papal monetary system, and Clement's early issues are distinguished from his later ones by subtle die differences documented in Muntoni's corpus — this being Munt#18, among the first year of his coinage.