Sesino - Alfonso II

Alfonso II Gonzaga ruled Novellara and Bagnolo as a minor imperial fief of negligible strategic weight, yet the counts maintained the privilege of coinage throughout the seventeenth century — a right jealously guarded even as the county's actual political influence contracted. The sesino was the workhorse denomination of small northern Italian fiefs, circulating locally in a region already saturated with competing small copper from Mantua, Reggio, and Mirandola.

MIR EM#881 places this squarely among the least-documented Gonzaga collateral issues. Alfonso II's reign of over three decades accounts for the relative frequency with which these turn up, though fine survivors are genuinely scarce.