The Museum of the Mint in Rome consists of about 20,000 works: coins, medals, minting objects, and wax models. The coins include a rich collection of issues from Italian and foreign states from the Middle Ages to the present day and an interesting core of studies for coinage, designs, and trial coins.
The collection of medals includes three main groups of particular historical and artistic interest. The first is composed of papal medals (1913 pieces), the second group consists of religious medals, also called devotional, from the 18th and 19th centuries, the third group includes medals of the twentieth century, works by Italian and foreign artists. In this group, there are also numerous works from donations, including the collection of cast medals by Orlando Paladino Orlandini (1905-1986).
The “minting objects” group includes dies and punches from the papal collection and some of those used for devotional medals.
The museum is enriched by a collection of wax models for medals and cameos, auxiliary material for the production of works that takes on the value and interest of autonomous creation. The largest group (425 wax models) is represented by the works of Benedetto Pistrucci (1784-1855). A Roman engraver, he carried out most of his activity in London at the Royal Mint, where he created the gold sovereign of which the museum displays the original model. Additionally, the wax models of Giuseppe (1808-1877) and Francesco Bianchi (1842-1918), father and son, engravers of the Papal Mint in the second half of the nineteenth century, are exhibited.
