1 Quattrino - Benedict XIV St. Apollinaire, double cross

Benedict XIV — Prospero Lambertini — was among the most intellectually serious popes of the eighteenth century, corresponding with Voltaire and overhauling canon law on beatification. His Ravenna mint operated under the centuries-old arrangement by which the papacy administered the Exarchate of Ravenna, a territorial holdover from Byzantine governance that Rome had controlled since the mid-eighth century. Small copper struck there circulated in a provincial economy largely disconnected from the grander monetary politics of Rome.

The quattrino was the lowest practical denomination in the papal copper sequence, minted to meet everyday transactional demand in a city whose commercial importance had declined sharply from its early medieval peak.