Scudo Romano - Pio IX Gaeta

Struck at Gaeta — not Rome — this piece reflects one of the most dramatic episodes in 19th-century papal history. Following the assassination of his minister Pellegrino Rossi and the popular insurrection of November 1848, Pius IX fled the city in disguise aboard the French ambassador's carriage, eventually taking refuge in the Neapolitan fortress of Gaeta. This bronze scudo was produced during that exile, as the short-lived Roman Republic took hold of the city he had abandoned.

The Gaeta mint operated only briefly under these emergency conditions, which accounts for the coin's X# reference — a numismatic acknowledgment that it falls outside conventional papal series.