Fontanellato

Fontanellato sits on the Parma plain, twenty kilometers northwest of Parma toward Piacenza. The Rocca Sanvitale dominates the central piazza: square plan, four corner towers (three cylindrical, one square), still surrounded by a moat fed by an old resurgence and crossed by a drawbridge. Construction began in the thirteenth century and continued through the fifteenth; the Sanvitale family held the manor for seven hundred years until Count Giovanni sold it to the municipality in 1948.

In 1524 Galeazzo Sanvitale commissioned the twenty-year-old Parmigianino to fresco a small vaulted ground-floor room with the myth of Diana and Actaeon. The mirror with the inscription respice finem hangs at the center of the vault. Fontanellato carries Borghi più belli, Bandiera Arancione, and Cittaslow recognition. The Labirinto della Masone, the world's largest bamboo labyrinth designed by Franco Maria Ricci, lies three kilometers north at Fontanellato's frazione of Masone.