Parma sits on the Via Aemilia, founded as a Roman colony in 183 BC, then ruled by Benedictine abbots, the Farnese dukes and Napoleon's widow Marie Louise. Three days trace that layering through crypts, a wooden theatre and a working-class quarter that fought Fascism.
Founded 1760 by Duke Philip to house finds from Veleia, the Roman town in the hills. Star piece is the Tabula Alimentaria Traianea, the largest inscribed bronze from antiquity, listing Trajan's farm-loan scheme. Tue–Sun 08:30–19:00.
Beneath Via Mazzini lie two arches of the bridge that carried the Via Aemilia over the Parma torrent from the 2nd century BC. The river shifted west in the Middle Ages, burying it; rediscovered in 1962 during roadworks and lit behind glass.
Benedictine complex founded 980, rebuilt 1490–1519, with Correggio's cupola of St John's vision and three cloisters. The attached pharmacy served the city from 1201 to 1766 and keeps its walnut shelving, majolica jars and mortars intact.
Rodolfo Tanzi founded this hospital in 1201; the surviving cross-plan ward of 1476 by Antonio da Cividale is one of Europe's earliest purpose-built hospital halls. It served patients until 1926 and now holds the city archive and library.
Giovanni Battista Aleotti built this all-wood theatre in 1618 for a Medici wedding that never happened; it was used barely a dozen times. Allied bombing on 13 May 1944 destroyed it, and it was rebuilt 1956–1962 from the original timbers and drawings.
Begun 1521 on a Greek-cross plan, this became the Farnese and Bourbon mausoleum: the crypt holds dukes from Ottavio Farnese to the last Bourbons. Parmigianino spent five years on the entrance arch frescoes and was jailed in 1539 for missing deadlines.
Devoted to Marie Louise of Austria, Napoleon's second wife, who ruled Parma as duchess from 1816 to 1847 and was genuinely popular. Her watercolours, gowns, Napoleon's court dress and the letters she stopped answering after 1814 are all here.
Ottavio Farnese laid out the garden in 1561; Petitot redesigned it for the Bourbons in 1749 with the Trianon-style layout still visible. The palace was Napoleonic prefecture, then Carabinieri barracks, and the park was the duelling ground of 19th-century Parma.
In 1519 Abbess Giovanna da Piacenza, fighting papal orders to enclose her convent, hired Correggio to paint her private dining room with Diana, putti and pagan emblems — a coded argument for female independence. Walled up for 250 years, reopened 1774.
In August 1922 the workers of this quarter across the torrent built barricades and held off 20,000 Fascist squadristi under Italo Balbo for five days — one of the few defeats the blackshirts suffered. Plaques on Borgo delle Grazie mark the barricade lines.
The conductor was born here in 1867, son of a tailor and Garibaldian volunteer. The ground-floor rooms are furnished as in his childhood; upstairs are batons, recordings and letters from his exile in America after refusing to conduct the Fascist anthem.
Alessandro Farnese ordered this five-pointed brick fortress in 1591, modelled on Antwerp's citadel he had besieged. It never saw a proper siege, served as a prison into the 1950s, and the ramparts now enclose a public park with the marble Renaissance gate intact.