2 Soldi

The Ionian Islands — Corfu, Cephalonia, Zante, and the rest — operated as a distinct administrative zone within Venice's maritime empire, and their coinage reflected that separateness. This 2 Soldi was struck not in Venice proper but for local circulation across the islands, where Venetian authority persisted long after Ottoman pressure had eliminated most of the Republic's other eastern possessions. By the mid-eighteenth century, these islands represented nearly the last of Venice's once-vast Levantine holdings.

The series ran until 1797, the year Napoleon's Treaty of Campo Formio extinguished the Serenissima entirely after over a millennium of continuous existence.