1850s, Italy. Brass Coin-Weight for a Sovrano (Lombardy-Venice) Coin. 11.10gm!

Mint Year: 1850s-1890s Denomination: Sovrano (coin-weight) Condition: Greenish deposits, otherwise XF-AU! Weight: 11.10gm Diameter: 27mm Material: Brass

Obverse: Denomination (SOVRANO) above crowned oval coat-of-arms of Lombardy-Venice. All within dotted border.

Reverse: Weight-adjusting marks which are a part of the production process of coin-wieghts.

The Duchy of Milan was an Italian state located in northern Italy. The duchy was created in 1395 by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, then the lord of Milan, and a member of the important Visconti family, that had been ruling the city since 1277.

At that time, it included twenty-six towns and the wide rural area of the middle Padan Plain east of the hills of Montferrat. During much of its existence, it was wedged between Savoy to the west, Venice to the east, the Swiss Confederacy to the north, and separated from the Mediterranean by Genoa to the south. The duchy was at its largest at the beginning of the 15th century, at which time it included almost all of what is now Lombardy and parts of what are now Piedmont, Veneto, Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna.

Under the House of Sforza, Milan experienced a period of great prosperity with the introduction of the silk industry, becoming one of the wealthiest states during the Renaissance.

From the late 15th century, the Duchy of Milan was contested between the forces of the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of France. It was ruled by Habsburg Spain from 1556 and it passed to Habsburg Austria in 1707 during the War of the Spanish Succession as a vacant Imperial fief.  The duchy remained an Austrian possession until 1796 when a French army under Napoleon Bonaparte conquered it, and it ceased to exist a year later as a result of the Treaty of Campo Formio, when Austria ceded it to the new Cisalpine Republic.

After the defeat of Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna of 1815 restored many other states which he had destroyed, but not the Duchy of Milan. Instead, its former territory became part of the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, with the Emperor of Austria as its king. In 1859, Lombardy was ceded to the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, which became the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.

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