Parco Ducale
Begin where the Farnese dukes came to enjoy themselves. Parco Ducale, known to locals simply as “il giardino”, covers 208,700 square metres in the Oltretorrente district, close to the Parma stream. It costs nothing to walk in, and it makes a calm, green warm-up before the stone, opera and frescoes of the centre.
Duke Ottavio Farnese was the first to imagine a park here, in 1561. He built a new villa where the 14th century Castello della Ghiara of Bernabò Visconti had stood, bought up the surrounding land and pulled down the buildings on it, sparing only the Renaissance Palazzetto Eucherio Sanvitale. The first garden followed a central avenue lined up with the façade of the new Palazzo del Giardino, designed by Vignola, with symmetrical flowerbeds and fountains on either side. Soon came hedges of rosemary and myrtle, oaks, plane trees, fruit trees and even vegetables, plus potted citrus trees that spent the winter months in heated shelters.
More than a century later the park became a stage. For the 1690 wedding of his son Odoardo II Farnese to Dorotea Sofia of Neuburg, Duke Ranuccio II had Domenico Valmagini create a large oval fish pond with a small island in the middle, at the end of the main avenue. The point was spectacle: mock naval battles, the naumachie, staged on the water for the court. Between 1710 and 1731 the dukes went further, with shows in the park in which lions, tigers and other wild animals were made to fight.
The fun ended with the family. When the Farnese line died out in 1731, the park slid into decline, and in 1745, during the War of the Austrian Succession, the troops of Prince Lobkowicz cut down every old tree, even those on the island in the pond, and burned them to feed their fires.
From here it is 870 m, about 12 minutes, to the Teatro Regio di Parma. On the way you pass the National Gallery of Parma, the Teatro Farnese, the Bodoni Museum and the Museo Glauco Lombardi.
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