1 Testone - Urban VIII S. Peter and S. Paul

Urban VIII — born Maffeo Barberini — was elected pope in 1623 and proved one of the most politically ambitious pontiffs of the seventeenth century, entangling the Holy See in the costly Castro War and maintaining a lavish court that strained papal finances considerably. The testone denomination had been a workhorse of central Italian silver coinage since the fifteenth century, and Urban's mint at Rome struck these across several die marriages, accounting for the Muntoni sequence spanning numbers 67 through 69.

Urban famously had Galileo condemned by the Inquisition in 1633 — two years after this issue closed — despite having been his personal patron earlier in the pontificate.