Brescia

Milan won the first round. In 1337, after the troops of Verona were beaten, Brescia gave itself to the Visconti, and for nearly a century it stayed in their hands, apart from the years 1404 to 1421 when the condottiero Pandolfo III Malatesta held it and kept a court there. In 1426 the city rose against Filippo Maria Visconti and placed itself under Venice, and when a Milanese army laid siege to it for months in 1438, it held out.

Venice came to count Brescia the richest city of its mainland dominions: in 1469 the city and its province alone paid about a quarter of the taxes raised there. Loyalty to Venice cost it dearly. Brescia had fallen to the French in the wars of the League of Cambrai, and in 1512 it rose and let a Venetian garrison in; in February Gaston de Foix stormed it, and his troops killed the garrison and thousands of townspeople. When Venice won the city back for good it pulled down every building near the walls so that no besieger could shelter there again. The worst blow came from the sky: in 1769 lightning struck the powder store in the tower of San Nazaro, and the blast flattened nearly a seventh of the city.