Vespasiano I Gonzaga (6 December 1531 - 26 February 1591) was an Italian nobleman, diplomat, writer, military engineer and condottiero. He is especially remembered as a patron of the arts and the founder of Sabbioneta, a town in Lombardy designed according to the Renaissance principles of the "Ideal City".
He was born in Fondi, a Colonna fief in the southern Latium, the son of Isabella Colonna and the condottiero Luigi Gonzaga, a member of a cade...
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Vespasiano I Gonzaga (6 December 1531 - 26 February 1591) was an Italian nobleman, diplomat, writer, military engineer and condottiero. He is especially remembered as a patron of the arts and the founder of Sabbioneta, a town in Lombardy designed according to the Renaissance principles of the "Ideal City".
He was born in Fondi, a Colonna fief in the southern Latium, the son of Isabella Colonna and the condottiero Luigi Gonzaga, a member of a cadet branch of the House of Gonzaga, Dukes of Mantua. Soon orphaned, he was educated under his aunt Giulia Gonzaga, who had moved to Naples to escape attempts from other members of the Colonna family to kill Vespasiano in order to obtain the fiefs he had inherited from his mother.
At the age of eleven he was sent to the Spanish royal court to complete his education under his uncle, the King Philip II of Spain. The latter found in Vespasiano one of his most faithful advisors, and made him a Great of Spain and then viceroy of Navarre and Valencia....
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