1 Ducat - Scipione Gonzaga

Bozzolo was a tiny Imperial fief in Lombardy, and by 1639 the Gonzaga cadet branch ruling it was operating on borrowed time — the main Mantuan line had been devastated by the War of Mantuan Succession (1628–1631) and the plague that followed. Scipione Gonzaga, as a minor sovereign lord, retained the right to strike gold coinage, a privilege the family defended jealously as one of the few remaining markers of genuine princely status.

The duchy itself covered only a handful of square miles. That a gold ducat of this quality emerged from such a diminished principality in its final decades makes the issue historically anomalous.