"Women in mini skirts and daisy dukes are the norm in society through the eyes of men, but a man wearing shorts shocks men".
Catch a film The now-ruined beachfront Palacio de la Chanca was built in the 15th century by the dukes of Medina-Sidonia, who profited hugely from the tuna fishing industry, the almadraba.
She lumbered her party with a "poll tax" which required both dukes and dustmen to pay exactly the same for their local-government services a tax so unpopular that her Tory successor rescinded it.
The city was threatened by an invading French army (it decided to sack Rome instead), and Michelangelo's elegiac memorial to two Medici dukes is reflected in the severity of the chapel's architecture; doors were blocked, niches empty and windows blind.
Of course, neither he, nor anyone else since the dukes of Burgundy amassed their vast princely libraries in the 15th century, had seen the greatest examples of manuscript illumination laid side by side.
There is little here about the infinite gradations that divided earls from dukes, elder sons from their brothers, established titles from ones of recent creation and Haileybury from Eton.
As a clue to ducal solidarity, a shared outlook (16 dukes, for instance, went to one school, Eton) probably matters more than breeding.
With Latin as his lingua franca, a multinational clergy acted as his civil service, the abbots and bishops akin to EU commissioners: he found them less susceptible to "selfish national interests" than the assorted dukes whose domains he broke down into 300 or so more manageable counties.
This was the home of the dukes of Parma, originally a Farnese principality batted back and forth between the Spanish and the Austrians for a century and a half until Italian unification in 1860.
Although the Gonzagas' dynastic ambitions ruined them, their collecting set a European standard for two centuries.The dukes of Mantua were no more lovable or attractive than other princes of their Machiavellian age.
