Before finance went global, it spoke Italian. Long before modern capitalism, many of the tools of global finance took shape in Italian cities. From Genoa to Florence to Venice, merchants and bankers developed practices and instruments that would later spread across Europe: public debt, bills of exchange, double-entry bookkeeping, and early forms of risk management. Alessandro Marzo Magno traces how medieval and early modern Italy played a central role in the emergence of modern finance, drawing a provocative line from Renaissance banking to today’s cryptocurrencies. A lively and accessible history of how money became what it is.