The Mint Museum of Rome consists of about 20,000 works: coins, medals, minting tools, and wax sketches. The coins include a rich collection of issues from Italian and foreign states from the Middle Ages to the present day, as well as an interesting core of studies for coinage, designs, and trial coins.
The medal collection includes three main groups of particular historical and artistic interest. The first consists of papal medals (1913 pieces), the second group is made up of religious medals, also called devotional medals, from the 18th and 19th centuries, and the third group includes 20th-century medals, works by Italian and foreign artists. This group also contains numerous works from donations, including the collection of cast medals by Orlando Paladino Orlandini (1905-1986).
The “minting tools” 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 sketches for medals and cameos, auxiliary material for the production of works that takes on independent value and interest. The largest group (425 waxes) 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. Also on display are the waxes 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.
