“Where did the money from the Pope’s offerings go?”. The two Corriere della Sera journalists Mario Gerevini and Fabrizio Massaro try to answer this question, in the book-investigation “I mercanti nel tempo – investigation on the pence of St. Peter and the reserved funds of the Vatican” in the bookshop for Solferino. Unscrupulous financiers, cardinals, monsignors, officials of the Holy See, hundreds of millions of offers from the faithful vanished between reckless investments and commissions paid to hungry intermediaries: Gerevini and Massaro reconstruct from the origin the story that exploded with the scandal of the sale of the Sloane Avenue building in London by the Secretariat of State and ended up at the center of an investigation by the Vatican magistrates that is making the Oltretevere walls tremble. It is the first journalistic investigation into the Pope’s reserved funds, from the mystery of the two hundred million dollars to buy the former Harrod’s warehouses to the revelations of the secret Vatican banker. At the center of the investigation is precisely the Pence of St. Peter “the hidden treasure, beyond any accounting control and administered by a small group of senior prelates and trustees, gathered behind a bureaucratic banner: General Affairs Office of the Secretariat of State”. How much money was kept in secret accounts (mainly in Switzerland)? How were they handled? Where were they invested? What hands are they in now? Who took advantage of it? And will Pope Francis have managed to impose cleanliness and transparency at the top of the Vatican? The authors go back to the current, thanks to access to unpublished sources and insider testimonies, internal documents of the Secretariat of State, papers of the Vatican criminal investigation, on the trail of surprising events such as the business with Lapo Elkann or the financing of the film on Elton John, the funds in Malta, the rescue of a university in Jordan, a small broker who keeps the Holy See in check, the head-on clash between the IOR and the Secretariat, thus creating a plot that looks like that of a fiction. Instead it is reality.