100 Lire Credito Artigiano

Credito Artigiano was a cooperative lending institution founded in Milan in 1946 to serve artisans and small tradespeople — the kind of borrowers largely ignored by the major clearing banks. These 100 Lire fiduciary notes were issued internally during the coin shortage of the mid-1970s, when the Italian government's failure to mint adequate small-denomination coinage forced hundreds of businesses, banks, and local authorities to issue substitute scrip. At peak, thousands of distinct emergency notes circulated across Italy, and the Banca d'Italia eventually moved to suppress them.

Marco Spada & C. S.p.A. was a small Milanese commercial printer, not a specialist security printer — which partly explains why the security provision here amounts to little more than a simultaneous front-to-back registration print.