Parma

The smell hit me before I’d even left the train station — something cured and animal and faintly sweet, carried on air that felt thick with it, as though the city itself had been marinating for centuries. Parma smells like prosciutto. This is not a complaint. I stood on the pavement outside the Stazione di Parma with my bag at my feet and breathed it in for a moment before walking anywhere, because some first impressions should not be rushed.

Parma is a city of extraordinary self-assurance. It produced Verdi — Giuseppe Verdi, whose birthplace lies twenty kilometres south in the village of Roncole, and whose Teatro Regio in the city centre remains one of Italy’s most notoriously demanding opera audiences. It produced the Farnese family, who built a palace here so large and ambitious it was never finished. It produced culatello di Zibello, that impossibly silky cured pork from the foggy plain west of the city, matured in cellars that smell like the inside of an old wine barrel. And it produced a culture of eating so refined that even a quick lunch counter sandwich achieves a kind of quiet perfection that more theatrical cities can’t replicate.

I spent the first morning in the Piazza del Duomo, which is one of the most complete Romanesque ensembles in northern Italy and also one of the most overlooked, because Parma lies just far enough from the tourist circuits that most visitors arrive by accident rather than design. The cathedral’s Corregio frescoes in the dome are technically virtuosic — spiraling figures ascending toward a painted heaven — but it was the baptistery that stopped me entirely. The pink Verona marble exterior ages from rose to amber depending on the angle of light, and inside, the medieval frescoes wrap the octagonal space in a programme of images that feel almost eerily alive. I sat on a stone step for twenty minutes and looked up.

The food, though. I went to a salumeria on Via Garibaldi — the kind of place with a glass counter and a man who has been cutting prosciutto for thirty years and knows, in the way that specialists know things, exactly how thin is correct. I ordered culatello and a piece of Parmigiano-Reggiano aged twenty-four months, and the man added a small glass of Malvasia dei Colli di Parma without being asked. It was eleven in the morning. The Malvasia was fizzy and slightly sweet and cut through the fat of the culatello in a way that made both things better. Outside the cathedral bells rang. I had nowhere else to be.

In the evenings the city reveals its bourgeois comfort. Parma is prosperous in a way that shows itself gently — good shoes, unhurried dinners, the kind of conversation that assumes food is worth arguing about. The Lungoparma, the riverside walkway, fills with people before dinner, not for exercise but for the same reason the passeggiata exists in every Italian city: the pleasure of being seen among the living. I walked it twice and ate at a different trattoria each night and was not disappointed once.

When to go: September and October, when the air has the particular quality of northern autumn and the sagra season brings small festivals to nearby villages. March is also excellent — the Verdi Festival sometimes runs in spring, and the food markets are at their most animated before the tourist shoulder season begins.