Cremona

The Visconti of Milan took Cremona in 1322, and from then on it followed Milan's fortunes. The strangest break came in 1406, when a captain in the pay of the city's former lords murdered his employer with all the men of his family, made himself master of Cremona, and in 1420 sold it back to the Visconti for 40,000 florins. In October 1441 the city saw the wedding of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti, the match that would carry the Sforza to the ducal throne. Venice held Cremona from 1499 to 1509, and after the French were driven out in 1526 it passed under Spanish rule.

Meanwhile its workshops were giving the world a new instrument. Andrea Amati made the first instruments of the violin family in the form still used, and in 1574 a consignment of 38 of them went to the young Charles IX of France. Generations of makers followed him, and the most famous of them all, Antonio Stradivari, is reckoned to have made more than a thousand instruments before his death in 1737.