Teston - Bonifacio Ferrero

The Abbey of Fruttuaria, founded in 1003 near San Benigno Canavese in Piedmont, held coinage rights as part of its broader temporal privileges — an arrangement that became increasingly anomalous by the sixteenth century. Bonifacio Ferrero, who served as commendatory abbot from 1529, was simultaneously Bishop of Ivrea and a cardinal of considerable political reach within the Savoy orbit, which likely explains how the abbey sustained minting activity this late.

Ecclesiastical testons of this type are genuinely scarce survivors. Most Italian monastic mints had lost practical coinage rights well before this period; Fruttuaria's persistence into the 1540s makes it an outlier.