Audioguides Parme

Parma is the kind of Italian city that makes the rest of Italian food feel apologetic. Prosciutto di Parma has been cured in the hills south of the city since at least the 13th century, and the specific microclimate of the Langhirano valley, with its dry mountain air from the Apennines, is the reason the same pig, the same salt, and the same eighteen months produce a ham that cannot be exactly replicated anywhere else. Parmigiano-Reggiano, made in the plains around the city, is aged in wheels of 40 kilograms and has been produced under regulations that define minimum aging, milk source, and production area since at least 1612. Local food is not a selling point in Parma; it is the baseline.

The city's cultural confidence comes partly from the Farnese dynasty, who ruled Parma from 1545 and turned it into one of the more cultured capitals of the Italian patchwork.

The Farnese Theatre in the Palazzo della Pilotta, built in 1618 almost entirely in wood, was one of the first theatres to use a permanent proscenium arch and still strikes you as astonishingly ambitious when you stand in it. Antonio da Correggio, who worked in Parma in the 1520s and 1530s, painted the dome of the cathedral and the Camera di San Paolo's ceiling with illusionistic foreshortening that influenced Baroque painters across Europe for a century.