1 Doppia - Julius Caesar Gonzaga

Julius Caesar Gonzaga ruled the tiny fief of Bozzolo — a enclave in the Po valley barely the size of a market town — as a virtually autonomous lord despite nominal Gonzaga family ties to the larger Mantuan duchy. The right to strike gold coinage was a jealously guarded privilege, and small lordships like Bozzolo exercised it aggressively, partly as a revenue mechanism and partly as an assertion of political standing that their territory alone could never justify.

CNI IV#4 is among the rarer Bozzolo gold attributions, with surviving examples turning up almost exclusively in northern Italian cabinet collections dispersed in the nineteenth century.