Pursuits
The World’s Oldest Bank Is Stuck With Beautiful Tuscan Villas It Can’t Sell
These are the properties behind the loans that has Monte Paschi creaking with billions of bad debt.
Scansano
Photographer: Michele Borzoni for Bloomberg Businessweek
The abandoned farmhouse surrounded by acres of prime Tuscan vineyards, known as the Aquilaia estate, stands as a monument to failure—to the tens of billions of euros in bad loans that sank the world’s oldest bank.
Born at about the same time as Michelangelo, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena crumbled under the weight of a lending binge whose legacy has become the headache of Italian taxpayers after the government said in December it would take it over.