About $, take a look at the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, e.g. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tempio_malatestiano,_esterno,_zoccolo,_stemma_sigismondo_01.JPG -- around A.D. 1450, it was commissioned by the Signore of Rimini, Sigismondo Malatesta (his surname meaning "bad head" in Italian), from Alberti, maybe the greatest architect of the Renaissance; it carries many instances of the "Sigismondo/Isotta" mark, which looks exactly like $ (an S with a vertical bar bisecting it) -- in some pictorial renderings, the vertical bar is a Tree (alleged to be the "Tree of the knowledge of good and evil" from the Genesis story) and the S is a snake (also from that story) around it. Isotta degli Atti was Sigismondo's mistress, bearing him 4 children (the elder one born when she was 14), and later his wife; you can find her in Ezra Pound's "Cantos". Connections between Italian Renaissance and early America may have been through Freemasonry (that's what Robert Anton Wilson implies in some of his great novels). At any rate, having seen those 1450-dated "$"s, can anybody confidently think they're just a "purely coincidental" identity with the American currency symbol...?-)