1 Ducato `Ongaro` - Agostino Spinola

The Spinola family secured the right to strike gold coinage at Tassarolo — a tiny fief southeast of Genoa — through the same combination of banking wealth and Habsburg patronage that made them dominant figures in the Army of Flanders. Agostino Spinola's ducato ongaro copies the long-running Hungarian ducat type precisely because that denomination carried universal acceptance across European trade networks, making the issuing authority almost irrelevant to merchants using it. A feudal lord minting Hungarian-type gold was not an act of ambition so much as a commercial calculation.

Tassarolo's output across this twelve-year window was modest by any measure, and the MIR cataloguers assigned only a handful of die variants to the entire Agostino series.