100 Lire Banca del Salento

Banca del Salento was not a bank in any conventional sense — it was a consortium of artisans from the province of Lecce issuing emergency local scrip during Italy's acute small-change shortage of the mid-1970s. The coin shortage of those years drove hundreds of Italian municipalities, cooperatives, and trade bodies to print their own substitute currency, technically illegal but widely tolerated by the Banca d'Italia until a 1977 decree forced most of it out of circulation.

Oronzo Giurgola signed as president of the Consorzio Fra Gli Artigiani, meaning this circulated within a specific artisan trade network in the Salento peninsula — the heel of the Italian boot — rather than through any general retail channel. Redemption outside that network was never guaranteed.