Until recently, the oldest famous example of form of an account was the one of the year 1211, found in the fragments of two parchments that originally belonged to a group of bankers from Florence working in Bologna.1 Being written in vernacular Italian it was published by Santini in 1887, for its importance in the history of the Italian language.2 After him, Fabio Besta devoted his attention to this document,3 emphasizing its accounting value, and for the same reason, Federigo Melis also recognized its importance in his History of Accounting.4 This document in fact contains a number of accountancy registrations that come in succession one after the other and without any space dedicated to the enunciation of the values, which appear inside the same related entries of money loans with interest. The fact that no other document was found in that time confirmed the fact...
