della Torre

The della Torre were a Milanese noble house who led the Guelph faction in Lombardy and held Milan before the Visconti. Taking their name from a Milanese tower house, they held the county of Valsassina and supplied podestà to cities across northern Italy from the early thirteenth century.

Pagano della Torre became captain of the people of Milan in 1240; his nephew Martino turned it into a family signoria from 1256. Their supremacy ended in 1277, when Napoleone della Torre was defeated and captured by Archbishop Ottone Visconti at Desio and died in prison, though the family briefly recovered Milan from 1302 to 1307.

Driven from Lombardy, the family settled in Friuli: Raimondo della Torre was Patriarch of Aquileia from 1273 and warred on Venice; three more kinsmen held that patriarchate. Other branches served in Austria and Bohemia; the most famous was Heinrich Matthias von Thurn, a leader of the Bohemian revolt that opened the Thirty Years' War in 1618.