10 Lire - Pavlvs VI

Paul VI issued this aluminum series during the years immediately following the Second Vatican Council, a period of unusual institutional turbulence for the Holy See. The 1970 suppression of the Pontifical Noble Guard and the Papal Gendarmerie — both centuries-old corps — was announced the same year this series began, part of a broader restructuring that Paul himself found politically exhausting.

Aluminum coinage for the Vatican was a deliberate postwar continuity, the metal chosen for low-denomination issues to keep production costs negligible on coins that rarely circulated beyond collector sets anyway.