1 Fiorino – Castiglione Delle Stiviere

In 1639, Castiglione delle Stiviere, a small but strategically significant town in the Duchy of Mantua, operated within a complex and strained monetary environment. The broader region was still recovering from the devastating War of the Mantuan Succession (1628–1631), which had been fought over this very territory and had culminated in widespread destruction and plague. The conflict had severely disrupted local economies and trade routes, leaving a legacy of fiscal instability. Officially, the currency was the Mantuan lira, subdivided into soldi and denari, but the reality was a chaotic circulation of coins from various Italian states and beyond, including Spanish silver reales and coins from Venice and Milan, their values fluctuating based on metal content and dubious credibility.

The monetary situation was further complicated by the practices of "clipping" (shaving precious metal from coin edges) and the circulation of worn, lightweight, or counterfeit coins. This debasement created a classic case of Gresham's Law, where "bad money drives out good," as merchants and citizens hoarded fuller-weight coins, worsening the scarcity of reliable currency for daily transactions. Local authorities, under the Gonzaga lords who ruled the duchy, struggled to enforce edicts on exchange rates and to stem the influx of inferior foreign coinage, but with limited success given the region's weakened post-war administration.

For the merchants, artisans, and peasant farmers of Castiglione, this meant daily economic life was fraught with uncertainty. Prices for essential goods like grain and cloth were unstable, not only due to local harvests but also to the confusing valuations between different coins. Trust in currency was low, and barter remained a common fallback. Thus, in 1639, the town's currency situation was a microcosm of a fractured Italian peninsula: a fragile local economy trying to function amidst a disordered monetary system, still bearing the deep scars of recent war and dependent on the unpredictable ebb and flow of coins from distant mints.