Address
Contacts
Opening times
The Museum can be visited by private individuals, free of charge, every last Saturday of the month (with the exception of May and August) from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm. During the visits, the staff of the Bank of Italy guides visitors through the collection of coins and banknotes contained in the Museum.
The Museum can be visited, free of charge, by schools (groups not exceeding 50 people), from Monday to Friday, preferably at 9.30 a.m., with the exception of the last Friday of the month. The visit must be booked at least 20 days before the chosen date with an email to be sent to servizio.cge.museomoneta@bancaditalia.it.
The email request must provide a contact person for the school.
In the same email the visit to the artistic areas of Palazzo Koch can also be requested. The Bank of Italy will reply by e-mail in a short time. At least one week before the visit, the school must send the list of participants via e-mail.
Information
For visits by schools, please contact the Monetary Circulation Management Service at the telephone numbers and emails indicated on the page.
For Saturday bookings go to the > portal
Description
The Money Museum of the Bank of Italy provides a broad view of the role played by money in different periods of history, covering a period of 5000 years. The Museum not only covers the evolution of means of payment in Italy, coins and banknotes, but also devotes significant space to the origins of money in Mesopotamia and Greece and its development in ancient Rome.
The Museum was founded in 1993 by the Bank of Italy on the occasion of the celebration of its centenary. The exhibition was curated by Dr. Balbi De Caro, Director of the Numismatic Section of the Museo Nazionale Romano.
The first nucleus of coins came from the merger between the banks (Banca Nazionale nel Regno, Banca Nazionale Toscana and Banca Toscana di Credito) that led to the establishment of the Banca d'Italia. In 1938 the Bank of Italy purchased a collection of coins, books and other documents from the Chief Cashier in the Roman branch of the Banco di Sicilia, Pietro Oddo, who decided to sell his private collection before becoming numismatic secretary to King Vittorio Emanuele III.
Subsequently, the monetary patrimony of the Bank of Italy was enlarged with the purchase of collections of paper money - "Cocconcelli (1951) and Spinelli (1989) - of Greek and Roman coins (1999-2003) and of Mesopotamian tablets (2000 and 2002).
