To the Romans, it was a fundamental province, and one of the first to obtain the privilege of citizenship. The Middle Ages saw the rise of the first independent Comuni, many of which dared to rebel and go to war against Frederick Barbarossa. The first European university was founded in 1088 in Bologna, which remained for centuries the capital of juridical knowledge, inherited from the corpus of Roman laws. During the Renaissance, the political fragmentation into signorie fostered a flourishing of the arts, with courts being hosts to artists, philosophers and poets.
Every connoisseur knows well that it’s the layering of the eras, the sedimentation of life—even that of a single shell—that concur to the creation of fertile ground. You will hardly ever see another place on which the passing of time and the sequence of historical figures have had a similarly beneficial effect.
The trinity of P: Parma, a galaxy of taste, Romanesque architecture and antiquarianism; Parmigiano, the undisputed king of cheeses; and Prosciutto, unique and unrivaled in the world, which is traditionally paired with the Malvasia of these hills.
We haven’t forgotten about the other Comuni, nor about Ferrara and the House of Este, which will be the subject of one of our next installments.
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