Парма

Parma is opera's most demanding parish. Verdi was born in its province — Roncole and Busseto lie an easy pilgrimage away — and the city serves as high temple of his cult: the Teatro Regio's audiences, above all the loggione's connoisseur-judges, are legendary as Italy's severest, and the Festival Verdi each October mounts the master's works with scholarly fervour and public passion, the whole city turned Verdian down to the shop windows. Toscanini completes the apostolic succession: the great conductor was born here in 1867, his birthplace a museum, his name on the Filarmonica that carries Parma's sound abroad.

The princely stage came earlier: the Teatro Farnese of 1618, the vast all-wood court theatre inside the Pilotta palace, is one of theatre history's wonders — Palladian illusion at ducal scale — sharing the complex with the National Gallery's Correggios and Parmigianinos; Correggio's dome frescoes in the cathedral and San Giovanni open their heavens over the pink Baptistery's Antelami carvings, Romanesque and proto-Baroque within a square of each other.

And then the table, for Parma is UNESCO's Creative City of Gastronomy with reason: prosciutto and parmigiano age in the surrounding low hills, culatello in the fog, the food-valley's industries funding the arias. Violets, Stendhal's charterhouse of the imagination, bicycles under the plane trees: Parma tunes life itself to concert pitch.