150 Lire Banca Provinciale Lombarda

Banca Provinciale Lombarda was a regional cooperative credit institution headquartered in Bergamo, and this 150 Lire note belongs to a class of emergency small-change substitutes — fiduciary tokens, technically — that proliferated across Italy in the mid-1970s when acute coin shortages left retailers and banks scrambling for alternatives. The Italian government had authorized these mini-assegni under a temporary framework that allowed certain licensed banks and businesses to issue low-denomination instruments as transactional stopgaps.

The MICR encoding line is the telling detail here: it reflects the instrument's hybrid identity as something processed like a cheque rather than circulated like a banknote.