Itinerary 1

The adventure

of money

Special lighting shines on parts of a bicycle suspended in mid-air. Telling the story that led to the building of the bicycle is a metaphor for the network of invisible collaboration and the complex mechanism at the heart of how the economy works.

The itinerary takes us back five thousand years to ancient Mesopotamia, which was the cradle of the oldest complex society in history. The first form of writing was invented and used here to record economic and financial transactions.

The adventure of money goes on to ancient Greece, where the use of minted money spread, which was the symbol of the power of sovereigns as early as the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. It was an exceptional invention, destined to replace all the previous means of payment, such as barley, or pieces of precious metal. A few centuries later, however, it was Roman civilization that founded its strength on money, together with its armies.

After a visit to imperial Rome, the journey continues to Tuscany in the second half of the 14th century, made rich by trade and the production of wool. The first modern banks were born in Italy around that time, and then spread to the rest of Europe. Moving on, you discover that the biggest customers of the Italian merchant bankers between the 14th and 17th centuries were European sovereigns. It was because of their defaults that public banks, the forerunners of modern central banks, sprang up in Naples, Venice, Genoa and other Italian cities.

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the adventure of money reveals how the new forms of energy and the growth of financial markets create huge growth over time, but at the same time cause new problems and risks.

The journey continues and we come to early 20th century Germany, where soaring prices and the economic crisis of 1929 provided fertile ground for the birth of Nazism. The consequences of this were the Second World War and its tragedies, destruction and the defeat of Germany.

One of the first public Italian ballrooms was opened in those years, in November 1921. It was called the Bal Tic Tac and was entirely decorated in a futurist style by Giacomo Balla, a great artist of the time. The room came to light while MUDEM was being created and links that period to the present day.

The history part is over and the journey continues in the present in the Finance as a time machine room, where you can see how financial instruments work and why we can call them 'promises to pay'.

The adventure of money through time continues with an analysis of payment means and systems that are stable and efficient and designed to protect the value of money and savings.

In the last room, visitors learn about the aggregate value of money and the role of the Bank of Italy and the Eurosystem in combating the risks of financial fragility and instability.