Cathedral Square

It is the city’s medieval square, with the Cathedral and Baptistery.
Romanesque art in purity, the Cathedral holds masterpieces, from Antelami’s bas-reliefs to the vault of the dome frescoed by Correggio.
On the way out, the pink Verona marble Baptistery carved by Antelami in the early 13th century is another icon.

St. John the Evangelist

Benedictine monastic complex with a Baroque facade has a Latin cross plan with three naves over which chapels open, and again, a dome frescoed by Correggio.
Visiting the cloisters and the ancient library of illuminated manuscripts feels like entering a scene from “The Name of the Rose.”
The apothecary shop that prepared healing concoctions is still there, with flasks, stills and mortars.

DucalPark
Ducal Park still retains the formal features of the 18th-century garden.
Centuries-old trees create an elaborate green architecture around the Boudard sculptural groups, and at the end of the avenues a lake houses the Trianon Fountain, while hidden by the forest remain the remains of the 1769 Arcadia temple.
In front of the Ducal Palace is a large circular clearing known as l’étoile, from which tree-lined avenues radiate out.

Teatro Regio
Red velvets and gilded friezes in a neoclassical structure commissioned by Maria Luigia of Austria, the Regio is one of the most important opera houses in Italy, with one thousand two hundred seats and more than seventy thousand tickets sold annually.
It is home to an audience of discerning melomaniacs.

The Pilotta Complex

Unfinished fortress with an inner courtyard where Spanish soldiers played pelota.
It contains three museums: the Palatine Library and the Teatro Farnese, a two-story spruce shell of loggias.
From the theater there is access to the National Gallery.
Worth the ticket is Leonardo da Vinci’s “Head of a Maiden” (“La Scapigliata”), a young woman with sweet features and a cascade of disheveled curls.
Leaving, one crosses the gardens of Piazzale della Pace, designed in the late 20th century by Mario Botta.

St. Paul’s Chamber

Correggio’s first truly excellent work is the Camera di San Paolo, a hidden and often forgotten gem.
It is inside the Benedictine women’s convent of San Paolo, among the wealthiest and most fashionable in the city.
Particularly when Abbess Giovanna Piacenza, a young woman, educated and strong-willed, was at its helm: from 1507, for seventeen years, she organized spaces and finances, received guests as in a Renaissance court, and designed an apartment where she invited artists and intellectuals from all over Europe.

The room, with its domed ceiling, is an illusionistic decoration of vegetal shoots in which faux ovates with hunting and mythological subjects open up: from the monochrome frescoed lunettes where simulacra of ancient gods are painted, rises an elaborate vault built in sixteen convex segments that pretend a bower of leaves, almost an umbrella of golden slats.
They bind at the apex in a labyrinth of interwoven ribbons that let fall festoons of fruit enclosed in the center by the abbess’s heraldic crest.
Further down, in each slice of the arbor, sixteen oval openings to the blue sky can be seen.

Bodonian Museum

The new Museo Bodoniano is the oldest printing museum in Italy, opened in 1963 to mark the 150th anniversary of the death of Giambattista Bodoni, the Piedmontese printer who made Parma the printing capital of the world from the second half of the 1700s. The new container is inside the former periodicals warehouse of the Palatina Library. It has a dual soul: the story of Bodoni’s forge on the one hand and, on the other, that of Parma’s culture in its golden age.

Old St. Philip Neri Pharmacy

Founded in the early sixteenth century (reopened after 50 years), it is a wunderkammer: old vitrines, stills, cruets and esoteric recipe books that tell of pstranus concoctions with deer antler, frog semen, crab-eyed centipedes and dragon blood.
Commissioned by the Congregation of Charity in 1652, it was one of the earliest examples of city welfare: it provided free medicines to those in need of treatment and health care, before the arrival of the national medical system.

Oltretorrente

The neighborhood beyond Parma: with the stores, small churches and old taverns where the “parmigiani del sasso” (the doc ones), used to give breath to Verdi’s romances, with voices kneaded with Lambrusco and bellies full of tripe.
Today a bohemian and multiethnic neighborhood, the music is more exotic.
The air smells of tajines and couscous.
There are organic addresses, alternative hangouts, stores where you can find spices, jewel churches like the Steccata.