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fifty that made up the Sorrowful Mysteries, and the fifty contained in
the Glorious Mysteries. Many who worked with him mistakenly
believed he was a cleric. In several books he is mistakenly identified
as a monsignor. But Nogara never entered Holy Orders, not even the
lay order of a religious brotherhood.

    Professionally, he was trained as a mineralogist and for many years
supervised mining operations in England, Greece, Bulgaria, and
Turkey. His fellow workers recalled his fastidious dress, his skill as a
linguist (Nogara was fluent in eight languages), and his standoffish
mannerisms. They also spoke of his photographic memory (Nogara
could recite entire cantos from Dante's Divine Comedy) and his
ability to compute numbers faster than any adding machine.
    Eventually, he entered the service of the Banca Commerciale
Italia, where he became a vice president and head of the bank's
branch in Istanbul. In this position he gained the trust and confidence of the occupying British forces as well as the Young Turks
under Kimal Ataturk, who were pressing for the creation of a new
Turkish republic. In his efforts to attract Western investments in
Turkey, Nogara became well known in the world of global finance
and came to serve as one of the administrators of the Inter-Allied
Reparations Committee that participated in postwar negotiations
between Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Turkey. From 1924 to
1929 his financial skills came to full play in his efforts to reorganize
the Reichsbank in order to stabilize Germany's postwar financial
problems. In this capacity he performed an amazing feat of fiscal juggling by reaping the payment of 2.5 billion Deutschmark for annuities from a loan of 800 million Deutschmark.3
    In Germany, Nogara came into regular contact with Archbishop
Eugenio Pacelli, the papal nuncio to the Weimar Republic, who
sought the financier's advise about the Roman Question, the question
of restitution for the Italian government's seizure of the Papal States.
In the course of their meetings, Nogara convinced Pacelli that the Vatican must abandon the old millennial idea of establishing an extensive
territorial Papal State and seek to become a powerful economic entity
through international investments. Only in this way, Nogara insisted, would worldly powers again be compelled to genuflect before the See
of St. Peter. In Rome, Archbishop Pacelli conveyed these opinions to
Pius XI, who sought the council of the financial wizard, particularly in
the preparation of the terms of the Lateran Treaty.

    When asked to direct the Special Administration of the Holy See,
Nogara agreed to accept under the condition that he be granted a
free hand to make appointments without clearing them with a higher
authority, to have total control over what to buy and what to sell, and
to operate the agency in complete independence from all other Vatican bureaucracies. The headquarters for the Special Administration
were established on the fourth floor of the Lateran Palace, next to the
private apartment of the pope. Its workings were esteemed to be of
such importance that Nogara became the only Vatican official with
free and unannounced access to the Holy Father.
    As the world fell into the grips of the Great Depression, Nogara's
first move as the Vatican's financier was to take over principal interest
in Banca di Roma, a firm that had many securities of no call value,
that is, securities that would pay little, if anything, if sold on the stock
market.4 He then managed to persuade Mussolini to include the bank
in the creation of the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IIR).
This was Italy's answer to the industrial devastation that ravaged the
country. The function of the IIR was to capitalize industrial companies to stimulate economic growth. The companies agreed to provide
one lira for every two lire raised from the private sector. All investments were secured by the government. Under this