10 Lire Comando del Corpo d'Armata Territoriale di Firenze

Emergency fiduciary notes issued by Italian military territorial commands during World War One fill a genuinely peculiar corner of Italian monetary history. When small-denomination coinage effectively vanished from circulation after 1915 — hoarded, melted, or simply overwhelmed by wartime demand — local military commands in several cities were authorized to issue their own low-value paper to keep commercial transactions moving. Florence's Corpo d'Armata Territoriale was among those that acted on this authority.

Printed by the Istituto Geografico Militare, which was already housed in Florence and primarily engaged in producing military maps and cartographic materials, rather than banknotes. The institutional mismatch shows in the printing quality relative to contemporary Banca d'Italia output.