4 Scudi

The Sacro Monte di Pietà di Roma was not a bank in the modern sense but a papal charitable pawnbroking institution, founded in 1539 to provide low-interest loans to the poor as an alternative to usurers. By the late eighteenth century it had become one of the primary sources of paper credit in the Papal States, issuing fedi di credito — essentially transferable deposit receipts — that circulated as a de facto currency among merchants and institutions in Rome.

The 1790s were a precarious decade for the institution. French military pressure was intensifying across the Italian peninsula, and by 1798 the Roman Republic would be proclaimed under French occupation, temporarily suspending normal papal financial operations. Notes issued in 1795 circulated right up to that disruption.

The S302 designation covers a handwritten series; individual examples vary in scribal hand, with manuscript date and amount entries that can show significant variation in ink oxidation and paper browning.