Every design for Parma

Prosciutto, cheese and music: Parma is known well beyond Italy for what it makes and what it sings, and UNESCO has named it a Creative City of Gastronomy.

Its history runs deep. A Bronze Age terramare village stood where the city is now; the Etruscans gave it a name the Romans used for a round shield; Rome founded a colony here on the Via Aemilia. In the Middle Ages Parma was a stop on the Via Francigena, the pilgrims' road to Rome, and from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth it was the capital of the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza. Its university is one of the oldest in the world.

Ask someone from Parma about home and you will hear about October and the Festival Verdi, about the Oltretorrente on the far side of the stream, about the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta in its square or the house where Arturo Toscanini was born, now the Casa natale di Arturo Toscanini. The Galleria Nazionale and the Palazzo del Giardino belong to the same easy walk.

Whatever brought you here, crossing one of the bridges over the Parma back into the old centre feels like coming home.