Duchy of Parma and Piacenza

The Duchy of Parma and Piacenza was the Farnese and Bourbon state of Emilia, lasting from 1545 to 1859. It was a pope's gift: Paul III carved the lands south of the Po out of the Milanese and made them a hereditary duchy for his son Pier Luigi Farnese, adding Piacenza a decade later. The Farnese ruled for nearly two centuries, filling Parma with Correggio's domes and a famous library, until the house died out in 1731. What followed was a century of being passed around: Habsburg emperors, then the Bourbon-Parma branch after 1748, then Napoleon, who annexed the duchy to France and afterwards granted it to his wife Marie Louise, the ex-empress, who ruled mildly until 1847. Returned to the Bourbons for a final decade, the little state read the same newspapers as the rest of Italy; in 1859 its duke fled before the national cause and Parma voted itself into the new Italian kingdom, ending three hundred years of ducal rule.