Sabbioneta

Vespasiano Gonzaga Colonna had a capital built for himself. Between 1554 and 1591, the year of his death, he raised out of the sandy plain between the Po and the Oglio a walled city containing everything a state requires: the palace for governing, the gallery for the collection of ancient marbles, the garden palace for leisure, the synagogue with the printing works founded in 1567 by Tobias Foa, and in 1590 the Teatro all'Antica by Vincenzo Scamozzi, the first theatre building of the modern age designed from the outset to be a theatre and nothing else. The state lasted as long as he did.

Four thousand three hundred and thirteen inhabitants in the province of Mantua, on the forty-fifth parallel, halfway between Mantua and Parma. On the prince's death the succession divided his heirs for almost a century, and then came the Austrians and the French: the citadel, the armoury and the outworks beyond the walls disappeared, in 1772 a Theresian decree carried the collection of antiquities off to Mantua, and in 1815 a fire destroyed the Hall of Horses. In 2008 UNESCO inscribed Sabbioneta together with Mantua on the World Heritage list, as an ideal city built in a little more than thirty years.