1 Soldo 'Virgilio'

The 'Virgilio' soldo takes its name from the poet Virgil, who was born near Mantua and claimed by the Gonzaga as a symbol of ducal prestige for centuries. This issue spans one of the most catastrophic decades in Mantua's history: the War of the Mantuan Succession broke out in 1628, drawing in France, Spain, and the Empire, and culminating in the sack of Mantua by Imperial troops in 1630 — one of the most brutal urban destructions of the Thirty Years' War. The city lost perhaps a third of its population to violence and plague in that single year.

That any civic coinage continued through this period at all reflects the administrative persistence of a duchy that effectively ceased to function as an independent power shortly after.