150 Lire Banco Lariano

Banco Lariano was a regional savings institution based in Como, and like dozens of Italian banks in the mid-1970s, it resorted to issuing its own fiduciary notes to compensate for a catastrophic shortage of small-denomination coinage. The Italian state had effectively run out of circulating coin — partly due to metal hoarding, partly inflation outpacing the cost of minting — and the Banca d'Italia quietly tolerated these local substitutes rather than solve the underlying problem.

Grafiche ATEM in Limbiate, a commercial printer with no particular banknote pedigree, produced these notes alongside similar issues for other northern Italian banks. The 150 lire denomination itself is a telling artifact: it corresponds to the price of a postage stamp at the time, the single most common transaction where exact change had become impossible.