3 Scudi

The Monte di Pietà di Roma was a charitable pawnbroking institution, not a state bank, and its paper emissions occupied an awkward legal and financial space in the Papal States economy. By the 1790s, the Monte was under severe strain — French military pressure on the peninsula had disrupted commerce and drained specie reserves across central Italy, forcing institutions like this one to lean harder on paper instruments than their underlying assets could comfortably support.

The S-prefix in the Pick reference places this squarely among the local and regional issues rather than the national series — a distinction that mattered enormously to contemporaries who ranked these notes well below papal treasury paper in terms of confidence.