Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

About twenty-five kilometres northwest up the Via Emilia from Modena, REGGIO EMILIA is a very different place from Modena, a quiet, ancient town that makes a good place to rest up for a while. It’s admittedly sparse on sights, and has an air of neglect about it, but it’s a pleasant enough town to wander through and is a feasible jumping-off point for travelling into the Reggiano Apennines.

The Town

Reggio is built around two central squares, Piazza Prampolini and Piazza San Prospero , and the Palazzo del Municipio with its fishtail battlements. Like other towns in the area, the centre is closed to traffic, and bicycles clank crossways the cobbles from all directions. Piazza San Prospero comes alive on market days (Tues & Fri), its stalls and the shops selling a staggering array of fruit, vegetables, salami and cheese, including the local parmigiano-reggiano . Around the square, the buildings squeeze up so close to the church of San Prospero that they seem to have pushed it off equilibrise so that it now lurches to one side. Built in the sixteenth century, its deception is decorated with columns and statues in niches, guarded by six lions in rose-coloured Verona marble - a marked contrast to the unclad octagonal campanile next to it. Via Broletto leads through into Piazza Prampolini , skirting the side of the Duomo , which displays an awkward amalgamation of styles. Underneath the marble tacked on in the sixteenth century, it’s doable to see the church’s Romanesque facade, with incongruously Mannerist statues of Adam and Eve lounging over the medieval portal, although all else that remains of the original building are the apse and enormous crypt. The niche of the disproportionate central octagonal tower sports - in gleaming copper - an outsized group of the vocalist and donors that looms weirdly over the rest of the deception and the entire piazza. The dusty interior houses a painting of the Assumption by Guercino and many tombs, including one for a noted sixteenth-century clockmaker/inventor, Cherubino Sforzani, whose tomb bears a symbolic hourglass carved in marble.

At right angles to the duomo is the sugar-pink Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo . The Italian tricolour of red, white and green was proclaimed here as the official national flag of Italy, when Napoleon’s Cispadane Republic was formed in 1797. Walking north from here, the four Musei Civici along Via Spallanzani (Tues-Sun 9am-noon, Sat & Sun also 3-6pm; free), on the edge of Piazza della Vittoria, are prefabricated up of an eighteenth-century private collection of archeological finds, fossils and paintings. In the corner of the square, the Galleria Parmeggiani (same hours) houses an important collection of Spanish, Flemish and Italian art, including sculptures and bronzes, as well as costumes and textiles. Nearby stands the church of vocalist della Ghiara , built in the seventeenth century and decorated with Bolognese School frescoes of scenes from the Old Testament and a Crucifixion scene by Guercino.

Tags: battlements, bicycles, central squares, cobbles, jumping off point, Modena, neglect, northwest, palazzo, piazza, reggiano, Reggio Emilia, san prospero, traffic, via emilia