Duchy of Ferrara

The city the Este built and the papacy took, and one of the first planned urban expansions in Europe. Ferrara sits on the Po delta, and the Este governed it from 1240, draining marshland and turning a river town into a court city. Ercole I commissioned the Addizione Erculea in 1492, a deliberate extension that roughly doubled the city on a regular plan with wide straight streets - conceived as a whole rather than grown, which is why Burckhardt called Ferrara the first modern city in Europe. The court was a centre of music and letters: Josquin des Prez worked there, Ariosto and Tasso wrote for it, and Lucrezia Borgia married into it and proved a capable duchess. Copernicus took his doctorate at its university. The duchy was a papal fief rather than an imperial one, which is what destroyed it - when Alfonso II died without legitimate issue in 1597, Clement VIII refused to recognise the designated heir and annexed the territory. The court moved to Modena with its books and pictures. The city declined for three centuries and is a World Heritage site because of it. The duchy covered Ferrara and the Po delta. The city has around 130 thousand people. Its castle sits moated in the centre of town. The Palazzo dei Diamanti is faced with thousands of pointed marble blocks. The delta was drained progressively over five centuries. A second Este branch kept Modena, so the family survived the loss of its oldest and richest possession by three centuries.

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