New additions week 43 - 2012

Another week with some great new banknotes. My mother recently visited Rome in Italy. Of course she knows I'm always interested in new banknotes for my collection so when she came across the store Numismatica Merulana in the Via Merulana she just had to go in. Lucky me! She came home with some very nice Italian banknotes. But that's not all this week because I also received my oldest German banknote to date.

The forst one from Italy is a Biglietto di Stato. These are banknotes printed by the state instead of the Central Bank. A modern example of such a note is the Euro. The Euro banknotes are printed by the member states instead of the central bank in Frankfurt. This particular Italian note is the 1 Lire from 1944 (P29b).
Another Italian note is the 1000 Lire from 1969 (P101b) with composer Giuseppe Verdi on it. This is a different signature variety than the one I already had (P101e).
The next one is the 2000 Lire (P115) with Guglielmo Marconi on it, the inventor of the radio.
The last Italian banknote is the very nice (and quite expensive) 50.000 Lire (P116b). The Italian hero on this banknote is the artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Yes, that guy from the book Angels and Demons by Dan Brown.
My final new banknote is the (in my humble opinion) beautiful 5 Mark (P8b) which was issued in 1904 by the German Empire. So this little blue friend is more than a 100 years old. Amongst collectors it's known as the 'Dragon Note' for obvious reasons.