Euro notes and coins arrive

The story

Many currencies, one market

Until a few decades ago, anyone travelling in Europe had to change money at every border. In Italy people paid in lire, in France in francs, in Germany in marks, in Spain in pesetas. Each time you had to do sums and you lost something in the exchange. Trade suffered too. For businesses it was worse: the value of currencies changed every day, which made prices and profits uncertain. With the single market, goods moved around without customs duties, but the currencies still divided countries.

The idea of a common currency was old, but it became a real project in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. Countries that wanted to adopt it first had to follow some rules about public finances, called “convergence criteria”: low inflation, and debt and deficit below certain limits. It was a time of sacrifices, particularly for Italy, which had to cut its deficit in order to be among the first to join: in 1997 the government even brought in a “tax for Europe”, partly paid back in the following years.

First in accounts, then in pockets

On 1 January 1999 eleven countries adopted the euro, at first as a “virtual” currency used in bank accounts and electronic payments, while the old currencies kept circulating. The exchange rates between the old currencies and the euro were fixed for good: for Italy, one euro was worth 1,936.27 lire. Meanwhile the European Central Bank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, which decides the monetary policy of all the euro countries, and its first president was the Dutchman Wim Duisenberg.

The decisive step came on 1 January 2002, when euro banknotes and coins really arrived in the pockets of about 300 million people in twelve countries: Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. For two months you could pay with either currency; in Italy the lira stopped being valid on 28 February 2002. In the weeks before, banks and post offices had handed out packs of euro coins to get people used to them.

What euros look like

There are seven banknotes, from 5 to 500 euros, and they show windows, doors and bridges: they were designed by the Austrian Robert Kalina so that no country is favoured, and they represent architectural styles from different periods of European history, not real buildings. There are eight coins, from one cent to two euros. They have one side that is the same for everyone and another that is different for each country. On the Italian ones you can see symbols such as the Colosseum, Castel del Monte, the Mole Antonelliana, Botticelli's Birth of Venus, the Marcus Aurelius of the Capitoline Hill, Leonardo's Vitruvian Man and Raphael's portrait of Dante. They can be used in all the euro countries, even though the design is different.

The changeover was not without controversy: many Italians had the impression that prices had gone up, especially for everyday goods such as coffee, bread and pizza, although economists estimate that the real increase was smaller than the one people felt.

The euro today

After 2002 other countries joined the euro: Slovenia in 2007, Cyprus and Malta in 2008, Slovakia in 2009, Estonia in 2011, Latvia in 2014, Lithuania in 2015, Croatia in 2023 and Bulgaria on 1 January 2026. Today there are twenty-one countries in the euro area, with about 350 million inhabitants. Some, like Denmark, chose to stay out; Sweden does not meet the conditions; the United Kingdom never adopted it and later left the Union.