Italy’s central bank is making the case for gold’s place in the modern reserve toolkit. Deputy Director General Sergio Nicoletti Altimari told the LBMA conference in Sorrento that Italy — the world’s fourth-largest official holder at 2,450 tonnes — deliberately kept its gold in the early 2000s, when other central banks were selling and gold looked like a stagnant, non-yielding asset.
Since 2022, he says, demand has shifted structurally toward central banks — mainly emerging economies — while jewellery’s share has shrunk and ETF inflows have been very large since 2025.
The drivers, in his telling: the freezing of Russian foreign assets raised attention to foreign-exchange reserve vulnerability, the ‘debasement trade’ of high public debt and fiscal expansion, and a gold-to-real-yields link that weakened significantly in 2025 and early 2026.
Altimari’s stated motives for holding gold: a safe-haven asset preserving reserve value in crises, a portfolio diversifier, and an asset with no credit or default risk — ‘no one’s liability’.
