The Scali or Scala company had been created in the early years of the 13th century and quickly rose to an important position (one member of the family became consul in 1215).
The Scali bank created a continental network organized in branches and employed agents in the most important centers of Western Europe.
In July 1326, to honor the visit of the podestat Charles, duke of Calabria, the city borrowed from the Scali and the Amieri companies in excess of 50,000 florins.
[5] These attempts to strengthen their positions failed and less than twenty years later the other two large Italian banks involved with the English crown had gone bankrupt.
This certainly points to the difficulty bankers of the time faced when trying to safeguard the public's trust in their ability to repay (numerous cases of fraudulent bankruptcy over the period made it all the more difficult).
In Italy they became bywords of the little faith one could put in a foreign sovereign; during the 1940s the Italian fascist cinema even used this theme as a propaganda weapon against the United Kingdom (Re d'Inghilterra non pagà, 1941).