How Was Parma Built

The centre keeps its Roman plan, with the Via Emilia running through as the main axis. What sits on it is mostly brick, the standard material of the Po plain, with stone reserved for the things that mattered.

The baptistery is the exception and the masterpiece: an octagon faced entirely in pink Verona marble, begun in 1196, with four tiers of loggias outside and a painted dome within. Antelami carved the portals and the cycle of the months inside, and the building marks the point where Italian sculpture moves from Romanesque into something individual.

The Palazzo della Pilotta is deliberately unfinished and looks it — a huge, blunt brick mass the Farnese never completed. Inside, the Teatro Farnese is built entirely of wood, a U-shaped auditorium with a permanent proscenium arch, and it was reconstructed after being destroyed by bombing in 1944.

The curing houses in the hills south of the city are the region’s other characteristic building type: long, narrow, many-windowed structures oriented to catch the valley wind, which is architecture designed around airflow rather than appearance.