With Tommaso Brollo (University of Verona)
Digital currencies, cryptocurrencies, and, more recently, Central Bank Digital Currencies have been prominent over the past decade. Are they truly something new? When we talk about monetary systems from four or five centuries ago, florins, sequins and ducats probably spring to mind, with their images of saints and crosses. At sixteenth-century international exchange fairs, however, a very different system was in place. The currency in use was intangible, a virtual system in the ledgers of private merchant bankers, and was used for trade across Europe for over a century. At once far removed from us and yet so close to our reality, it may help us better understand what is taking place in our time.
Tommaso Brollo studied in Trento and Milan, and has a PhD in Economics from the University of Siena. As a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Verona, his work focuses on economic history and the history of economic thought, and particularly on the history of money, credit and finance in the early modern age. His published work includes a new Italian edition of De Moneta, the fourteenth-century treatise by Nicole Oresme, co-curated, with Paolo Evangelisti (Trieste, 2020).
