The official site of Italy's central bank

From the Second World War to the euro

With the Second World War underway but Italy not yet a belligerent, the Bank decided to move the printing works from the centre of Rome to the relative safety of the provincial city of L'Aquila. The renovation of the building selected, which was near the railway station where the new paper mill would be built, began in December 1939. The transfer of the machinery and staff for the new plant was completed between November and December 1941.

This plant produced Italy's banknotes during the war, even after the dramatic bombardment of 8 December 1943, which killed 19 people. Production was terminated on 11 June 1944 when the machines were mined by the German army in its flight northward. That summer it was decided to reopen the Roman works in Via dei Serpenti, and all the equipment that was still usable was moved back there and the damaged machines repaired. The paperworks was reactivated in 1945.

The works began to operate full-steam, but eventually the increased volume of production required a new plant. In 1968 the entire banknote printing works was transferred to its present-day facilities in Via Tuscolana, near the Claudian Aqueduct and a recently excavated ancient Roman road.

Work for the new building began in late 1962 on plans by Pierluigi Nervi. Constricted by the nearness of the aqueduct, he produced a vertical rather than a horizontal design, certainly atypical for an industrial building. Another distinctive feature is that the main workshops and machines are not on the ground floor but on the second of the six storeys, much to the benefit of workplace health, safety and security.

The plant has about 110,000 square meters of floor space, with a covered area of 9,600 square meters and a total volume of 225,000 cubic meters. Thanks to careful study of weights and balance and intelligent use of glass, Nervi succeeded in the difficult task of attenuating the feeling of bulkiness and achieving a luminosity more typical of residential than industrial architecture.

Today the printing works in Via Tuscolana performs the entire banknote production cycle. The watermark paper and the ink are procured from outside suppliers. For the production of the euro the plant has a machine for hologram application and one for silk-screen printing and a new banknote cutting and quality-control line.