10 000 Lire

This series was issued during the immediate postwar period, when Italy's currency had been catastrophically inflated by wartime spending, Allied Military Currency injections, and the near-total collapse of industrial output. The 10,000 Lire denomination — enormous by prewar standards — was a direct consequence of that inflation, and its existence marks how far the lira had fallen in real purchasing power by the mid-1940s.

Printed on a notably elongated format, this note was produced under difficult conditions at a time when the Banca d'Italia was still reconstituting normal operations following the war. Known to develop brittleness along the horizontal fold lines due to paper quality constraints of the period.