The Italian Lira, with its subdivisions into 100 centimes, was the official currency of Italy from 1861 to 2002 when it was ultimately replaced by the European currency, the Euro. It was the currency in Don Bosco’s time and in the early history of the Salesian Congregation.
The Italian Lira (abbreviated as £ or Lit.) was first minted by the Republic of Venice in 1472. In 1806, it was adopted by the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, also known as Regno Italico, founded in 1805 by Napoleon Bonaparte, when he had himself crowned as ruler of the northern and central-eastern part of what is now Italy. Ten years later, in 1814, following the dissolution of the Napoleonic state, the currency of the Kingdom was maintained only in the Duchy of Parma and the Kingdom of Sardinia. After another two years, in 1816, King Victor Emmanuel I of Savoy introduced the Savoy lira, which remained in circulation until the birth of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, when it became the Italian lira. This currency remained in circulation until 2002, when it was replaced by the Euro.
When we follow the history of Don Bosco and the Salesian Congregation, we always comes across the difficulty of correctly quantifying the financial efforts that were made to support and educate thousands, indeed tens of thousands of boys, as the Italian currency has undergone great variations over the years. The difficulty increased even more with the adoption of the European currency, when in 2002 the exchange rate was set at 1936.27 Italian lira for one Euro. And there have been further significant variations due to inflation.
We propose below a calculation table of the revaluation of the Lira from 1861 to 2002 with the possibility of an update to 2022.
The calculations were made on the basis of the revaluation coefficients provided by the Central Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) and were determined according to the trend of the cost-of-living indices, which since 1968 have taken the name of consumer price indices for blue- and white-collar households. For the period after the year 2002, the inflation index was added, which comes to 38.70% in 2022 compared to the time of the launch of the single currency (Euro), based on data provided by ISTAT itself (1 Euro in 2002 = 1.39 Euro in 2022).
