Grosso of 3 imperials - In the name of Conrad II

Piacenza's civic coinage emerged from the fragmented authority of the Lombard communes, which began asserting monetary rights largely without imperial sanction during the twelfth century. Striking in the name of Conrad II — a ruler dead since 1039 — was a deliberate political maneuver: invoking a distant emperor carried none of the obligations that acknowledging a living one would demand, while still providing a veneer of legitimate authority that purely civic imagery could not.

This fiction persisted across nearly two centuries of production, making attribution by style and die work essential to any serious dating within the 1140–1313 bracket.