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5 Lire - Victor Emanuel III
| Issuer | Ministero delle Finanze (Ministry of Finance), Italy |
|---|---|
| Year | 1940-1944 |
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| Printer | Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, Rome, Italy |
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|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | REGNO D'ITALIA BIGLIETTO DI STATO A CORSO LEGALE LIRE CINQUE LIRE ISTITUTO POLIGRAFICO DELLO STATO OFFICINA CARTE VALORI IL DIRETTORE GENERALE DEL TESORO VISTO PER LA CORTE DEI CONTI IL CASSIERE SPECIALE (Translation: Kingdom of Italy / Legal tender State note / Five Lire / State Polygraphic Institute / Value Cards Workshop / The Director General of the Treasury / Seen by the Court of Auditors / The Special Cashier) |
| Reverse description | Printed in steel-blue intaglio on a cream ground, the central vignette shows a Fascist eagle with spread wings perched atop a fasces, set against a fine guilloche background. A circular denomination panel bearing '5 LIRE' occupies the left cartouche, while a large rosette guilloche medallion fills the right cartouche. The serial number appears in all four corners, and a legal text band runs along the upper and lower borders. |
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| Comments |
These small-format treasury notes were introduced as an emergency substitute for the 5 lire coin, which had effectively vanished from circulation by 1940 — hoarded, melted, or simply exhausted by wartime demand. The Ministero delle Finanze, rather than Banca d'Italia, was the issuing authority precisely because these were conceived as state vouchers replacing metallic currency rather than banknotes in the conventional sense.
The date range across this series reflects a prolonged production run through some of the most chaotic years in modern Italian history — the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, the Armistice, and the subsequent German occupation all occurred while notes of this type remained in active use.