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The Consorzio degli Istituti di Emissione was not a bank but a consortium arrangement — a forced pooling of Italy's six note-issuing banks, created in 1874 under the Minghetti government to manage the inconvertible paper currency that had been circulating since 1866. These notes were a collective liability, not the obligation of any single institution. The arrangement was always understood as temporary and was dissolved in 1883 when convertibility was finally restored.

Printing at the San Teodoro workshop in Rome placed production firmly under state supervision rather than with any of the consortium's member banks — a deliberate choice given the political tensions between them.