ABSTRACT
From 1854, Nicola Bottacin (1805–1876), a wealthy textile merchant in Trieste, began to collect coins. He initially decided to specialize in the systematic collection of Venetian coins, and he contacted the Venetian dealer Carlo Kunz, from whom he made his first purchase of 125 coins for 1,000 francs on 4 January 1857, as Bottacin wrote in his ‘Journal of numismatic purchases’. From this moment on, Bottacin extended his interest also to medieval and modern coins of other Italian states, in particular the Papal State, and to Napoleonic coins, as well as to medals from the 15th to the 19th century. Using the data recorded in his ‘Journal’ as a documentary source, it is possible to reconstruct the network of his suppliers and the quantity of coins purchased in the period 1857–1865, the years preceding the founding of the Bottacin Museum in Padua on 28 December 1865.
