20 Baiocchi - Pio IX 835 Silver

These final years of Papal temporal power were genuinely desperate ones. By 1865, the French garrison in Rome was the only thing keeping Piedmontese forces from completing Italian unification, and Pius IX had already lost the Romagna, the Marches, and Umbria to Vittorio Emanuele II in 1860. The coinage continued as if nothing had changed, but the Papal treasury was under severe strain — the .835 fineness of this issue reflects a subtle debasement from earlier standards, a quiet fiscal concession.

The temporal authority it was minted under would survive only until September 1870, when Italian troops breached the Aurelian Wall at Porta Pia.