Parma

The strongest of those signori came from Milan. The Visconti took Parma in 1346, and apart from five years under a local condottiero from 1404 it stayed Milanese until the Italian Wars, first under the Visconti and then the Sforza, who ruled through allied noble families; these raised castles across the countryside and turned their fiefs into small states of their own. The French took it in their turn, until papal and Spanish troops drove them out in 1521, and in 1545 Pope Paul III made Parma a duchy for his son Pier Luigi Farnese.

The Farnese gave Parma a court of its own for nearly two centuries, and in 1618 the duke had the great wooden Teatro Farnese built inside his palace of the Pilotta. When the line died out in 1731 the duchy passed to Elisabetta Farnese's son Charles, but once he had won the throne of Naples he gave Parma up to the Habsburgs in 1735 and carried the Farnese collections off with him. The city had a court again only in 1748, when it went to his younger brother Philip.