100 Lire

This note was issued during the height of Fascist autarchy, when Mussolini's government was actively restricting foreign exchange and enforcing currency controls across the Italian economy. The Banca d'Italia had been formally subjugated to state control under the 1936 banking law, stripping it of meaningful independence — these notes circulated in an economy already under severe political management, two years before Italy entered the war.

Wartime hoarding and the subsequent 1945–1947 monetary stabilization measures mean that genuinely circulated examples from the 1938–1939 printing window are considerably less common than uncirculated survivors, which were often hidden rather than spent.