Piazza Salembeni - Siena - Tuscany

The neo-Gothic style Salimbeni Palace in Piazza Salimbeni houses one of the oldest banks in the world. The Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena was founded in the second half of the fifteenth century. It is still one of the largest banks in Italy.

The original Palazzo Salimbeni was built in the fourteenth century. But it received a major facelift in the nineteenth century resulting in the neo-gothic style it has today.

In addition to the offices of the bank, the palace also houses a small museum with works of art collected by the bank over the centuries.

In the middle of the beautiful Salimbeni square is a statue of Sallustio Bandini, made in 1880 by Tito Sarrocchi.

Bandini was an Italian economist who invented the bill of exchange and with it a new method of payment. The highly regarded philosophical economist who was appointed archdeacon in the eighteenth century, donated his personal library, which contained several thousand books, to the inhabitants of his beloved city of Siena.

Willem Vandenameele