300 Lire Banca Popolare del Montefeltro e del Metauro

This note belongs to the extraordinary wave of Italian fiduciary minassegni — essentially privately issued scrip — that flooded circulation in the mid-1970s when Italy suffered a catastrophic shortage of small-denomination coins. Banks, businesses, and cooperatives all issued their own substitutes, tolerated by authorities as a temporary fix that lasted, embarrassingly, the better part of a decade.

The Banca Popolare del Montefeltro e del Metauro operated in the Marche-Romagna border region. A 300 lire denomination is among the more unusual values in this scrip wave — most issuers stuck to rounder figures, making this an outlier worth noting for type collectors.