10 000 Lire del Castagno

The "del Castagno" nickname comes from Andrea del Castagno, the fifteenth-century Florentine painter whose work appeared on the note — a rare instance of a quattrocento master reaching Italian mass circulation. Cionini's engraving work for the Officina della Banca d'Italia during this period was among the finest intaglio produced domestically, and this series is generally regarded as one of the more technically accomplished high-denomination issues to come out of Rome in the postwar decades.

The note circulated through a period of severe Italian inflation — by the early 1980s, 10,000 lire had lost a substantial portion of the purchasing power it held at first issue in 1976. It was eventually demonetized following the introduction of higher denominations made necessary by that same inflationary pressure.