Silver unspent.Silverunspent.

This coin was struck by hand in the mint of Marco Dandolo of Venice, somewhere in the year fifteen hundred, from a bar of silver that had already lived one life as a church candlestick. The kneeling doge on its face was cut into the die by an apprentice whose name nobody wrote down, and the strike landed a little off centre, as they often did. It passed through the purse of Tommaso the gondolier, paid for a night's lodging in Chioggia, and was lost in the mud of the lagoon for four hundred years. A fisherman's daughter, Lucia Bortolotto, found it in the spring of 1923 and kept it in a snuff tin under her pillow. The high points wore smooth against her thumb. Every scratch on it is a hand it has known, and every hand is a story that nobody finished telling.