Fontanellato

The name comes from water: Fontana Lata, the wide spring, for the fontanili, the natural springs that surface by themselves in the plain of the lower Parma country. The moat that still runs round the Rocca Sanvitale is one of those springs too, not a work of engineering. Once the water was everywhere: since at least the sixteenth century a broad water-filled ditch, the fossa circondaria, girdled the whole borgo, and it was closed only in 1849 for reasons of hygiene. The fortress had begun in 1124 as a plain defensive tower of the Pallavicino, then passed to the Sanvitale, who stayed bound to the town for more than five centuries: in 1948 the last count, Giovanni Sanvitale, sold it to the comune, which put the town hall inside it and opened the rooms to the public. Both things are in the arms, the fountain and the castle, and across the castle the red band of the Sanvitale.

Inside the castle there are two rooms worth the journey, and they are opposites. One is the little room of Diana and Actaeon, painted by Parmigianino between 1523 and 1524. The other is the camera ottica, made in the nineteenth century in the round tower to the south: a dark room where a small hole works as a lens and brings in there, onto the wall, the image of the square that lies outside. Out of the town, in the fields of Casalbarbato, there is a third thing nobody expects: an enormous maze, designed and built by the publisher Franco Maria Ricci, made entirely of bamboo. And in the middle of the borgo stands the sanctuary of the Beata Vergine del Santo Rosario, put up by the Dominicans in the sixteenth century and rebuilt in baroque style, where the pilgrims keep arriving.