Piacenza

Piacenza stands on the south bank of the Po, on the Via Francigena, the pilgrims' road to Rome. It was a free commune from 1126 and one of the founding cities of the Lombard League; the preliminaries of the Peace of Constance were signed at the basilica of Sant'Antonino in 1183. Two centuries of feuding between Guelph and Ghibelline noble houses ended in 1335, when the Visconti took the city, and apart from short breaks it stayed under Milan until the Papal States took it in 1521.

The basilica of San Francesco, built in Lombard Gothic between 1278 and 1373, and the Romanesque cathedral of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries show how much the city built. In 1545 Pope Paul III made Piacenza and Parma into a duchy for his son Pier Luigi Farnese. After Pier Luigi was murdered in a plot of Piacenza nobles, the city briefly returned to Milan before passing to his son Ottavio Farnese in 1556. When the Farnese line died out, the Bourbons ruled from 1731.