100 000 Lire Caravaggio - 1st type

The 100,000 Lire denomination only became practical once Italian inflation had thoroughly eroded the lira's purchasing power — by the early 1980s, a note of this value was needed for ordinary transactions, not exceptional ones. Banca d'Italia's decision to use Caravaggio as the central theme was a deliberate cultural statement during a period when the institution was reasserting its design ambitions after years of conservative issue policy.

Cionini and Capponi's intaglio work on the obverse is technically accomplished even by European central bank standards of the period. The Officina della Banca d'Italia, one of the few state printing works that engraved and printed entirely in-house, handled the full production run across the note's decade-long lifespan.