The 10 best towns you can reach by train within 75 minutes of Parma

1. Canossa

Best for a walk through the old town. It is on the list of Italy's most beautiful villages.

46 min from Parma · homes €700 to €1,000 a m² in the center · 3,770 people

Why visit Canossa

Canossa sits on the Apennine slope thirty kilometers south of Parma and twenty-five southwest of Reggio Emilia, at 219 meters at the seat in Ciano d'Enza. The commune is named for the ruined fortress on a white limestone outcrop eight kilometers east, built before 950 by Adalbert Atto of Lucca and held by Matilde di Canossa until her death in 1115.

The fortress was destroyed by Reggio Emilia in 1255. The commune was itself called Ciano d'Enza until 1992, when it took the older name back, so the seat in the valley and the ruin on the hill now share one name across two places.

Vineyards on the surrounding slopes produce Lambrusco and the Spergola white grape, and the path between Ciano and the castle ruin remains the Sentiero Matilde, the same climb that once carried Henry IV to the gate where Gregory VII made him wait. A commune this small holds an outsized memory: a valley seat, a demolished hilltop stronghold, and a name discarded and then reclaimed, all turning on three days that happened at the top of the path.

What to see in Canossa

• Castello di Canossa. Fortress on a white sandstone outcrop, its walls reduced to a ruin standing over the valley since the demolition of 1255. The site now houses the Museo Nazionale Naborre Campanini.
• Castello di Rossena. Best-preserved of the Matildic castles, built in the tenth century on volcanic rock to guard the western approach to the ruin on the neighboring hill.
• Torre di Rossenella. Square watchtower a kilometer from Rossena, built on a separate basalt pinnacle as a forward observation post for the defensive system below.

How to get to Canossa

It has its own railway station. Parma is about 46 min away by road.

Everything we know about Canossa

2. Pizzighettone

Best for a slow weekend. The Touring Club gives it its orange flag for small inland towns.

1 h 5 min from Parma · homes €750 to €1,100 a m² in the center · 6,209 people

Why visit Pizzighettone

Pizzighettone sits on the river Adda in the Po valley at 46 meters above sea level, half an hour west of Cremona and an hour southeast of Milan. The Adda cuts the town in two: Pizzighettone proper on the east bank, the smaller Gera on the west, joined by a single bridge.

The 16th-century walls run two kilometers around the historic center, twelve meters tall and three and a half thick, and they hold a network of guardhouses called Casematte that visitors can walk through with a guide. The Torre del Guado, part of the older Rocca fortress, held the captured King Francis I of France for roughly fifty days in 1525 after his defeat at Pavia, before the Spanish transferred him to Madrid.

Most of the medieval Rocca was demolished after Italian unification; the tower is one of two that survived. The Bandiera Arancione recognizes the walls and the colourful interior of the Chiesa di San Bassiano in Gera.

What to see in Pizzighettone

• Mura e Casematte. 16th-century walls, two km long, twelve m tall, with a network of vaulted Casematte guardhouses open to visits.
• Torre del Guado. Surviving tower of the Rocca, where Francis I of France was imprisoned in 1525 after his capture at the Battle of Pavia.
• Chiesa di San Bassiano. Parish church in the Gera quarter, known for its richly painted interior, claimed locally as the most colourful church in Italy.

How to get to Pizzighettone

It has its own railway station. Parma is about 1 h 5 min away by road.

Everything we know about Pizzighettone

3. Gualtieri

Best for a walk through the old town. It is on the list of Italy's most beautiful villages.

47 min from Parma · homes €700 to €1,000 a m² in the center · 6,355 people

Why visit Gualtieri

Gualtieri sits at 22 meters on the right bank of the Po, twenty-five kilometers north of Reggio Emilia, on the floodplain the Bentivoglio family reclaimed in the late sixteenth century. Piazza Bentivoglio, designed as a perfect hundred-meter square with arcades on three sides and sixty-nine arches, is the largest porticoed square in Emilia.

Palazzo Bentivoglio at the closed end was built between 1594 and 1600 by Ippolito Bentivoglio, who incorporated the older family Casa Vecchia. The square and the palace flooded repeatedly through the centuries; the 1951 Polesine flood reached 3.80 meters, marked on the arch keystones.

The Palazzo holds the Antonio Ligabue Museum: Ligabue (1899-1965), the self-taught Naïf painter who lived in poverty on the Po floodplain, painted the jaguars, tigers and rural scenes that have made him the most recognized twentieth-century Reggiana artist. The same building holds the Umberto Tirelli costume collection.

What to see in Gualtieri

• Piazza Bentivoglio. Hundred-meter-square arcaded piazza laid out in the late sixteenth century, with sixty-nine arches on three sides and Palazzo Bentivoglio closing the fourth.
• Palazzo Bentivoglio. Late-sixteenth-century palace by Ippolito Bentivoglio, with frescoed halls and a series of allegorical cycles by Pier Francesco Battistelli and Marcantonio Franceschini.
• Museo Antonio Ligabue. Permanent collection of paintings and sculptures by the Naïf master Antonio Ligabue, housed inside Palazzo Bentivoglio.

How to get to Gualtieri

It has its own railway station. Parma is about 47 min away by road.

Everything we know about Gualtieri

4. San Benedetto Po

1 h 9 min from Parma · homes €700 to €950 a m² in the center · 6,729 people

Why visit San Benedetto Po

San Benedetto Po sits at 19 meters in the flat Po plain, 22 kilometers southeast of Mantova, on what was once an island between the Po and the Lirone rivers. The town has no origin apart from the abbey: in 1007 Tedald of Canossa, grandfather of Matilda, granted half his land between the two rivers to the Benedictines, and the resulting monastery became one of the principal centers of the Gregorian Reform in northern Italy.

Matilda herself, the countess who hosted the emperor's penance at Canossa in 1077, was buried within it for five centuries before her remains went to Rome. The abbey held its position from its founding until the Napoleonic suppression of 1797 emptied the community out, by which time it had grown its church, its three cloisters, its refectory and infirmary.

What is left standing today is essentially the monastery's own floor plan with the town arranged around it. A place built entirely by and for a religious institution, still legible as such long after the monks themselves are gone.

What to see in San Benedetto Po

• Abbazia di San Benedetto in Polirone. The complex holds frescoes by Correggio and statues by Begarelli, added when Giulio Romano restructured it between 1540 and 1547.
• Basilica di San Benedetto. The church Giulio Romano redesigned stands at cathedral scale, the visual center around which the rest of the monastery is arranged.
• Chiostri di Polirone. Three cloisters, one for each major building phase from medieval through Renaissance, forming the working spine of the monastery behind the church.

How to get to San Benedetto Po

It has its own railway station. Parma is about 1 h 9 min away by road.

Everything we know about San Benedetto Po

5. Borgo Val di Taro

1 h 7 min from Parma · homes €550 to €800 a m² in the center · 6,732 people

Why visit Borgo Val di Taro

Borgo Val di Taro sits at 411 meters in the upper Taro valley, sixty-three kilometers southwest of Parma, where the province borders Tuscany and the Ligurian ridge is a few valleys away. The town was a Roman waystation, then a possession of the Bobbio abbey, then of the Landi and Doria-Landi families through the medieval centuries.

Modern Borgotaro built itself around the porcini trade: the Boletus mushrooms gathered in the surrounding chestnut woods were already famous in the nineteenth century, exported by emigrants to the Americas, and in 1996 the European Union granted the Fungo di Borgotaro Protected Geographical Indication status, locally described as the first such recognition for a wild mushroom. The Consorzio per la Tutela dell'IGP Fungo di Borgotaro, set up in 1995, now guards the name.

The Cittaslow movement admitted the town in the 2000s. The September Fiera del Fungo di Borgotaro is the calendar event; population has dropped under seven thousand but the porcini trade still anchors the local economy.

What to see in Borgo Val di Taro

• Centro storico. Medieval town center along the Taro, with the Palazzo Tardiani, the Piazza Manara, and the porticos lining the old market street.
• Chiesa di Sant'Antonino. Baroque parish church built in 1667 with a 1925 neoclassical facade, holding a fifteenth-century wooden crucifix and a chapel of the Madonna del Carmine.
• Palazzo Tardiani. Late-sixteenth-century palace near Sant'Antonino, once the town hospital, now the offices of the Valli del Taro e del Ceno mountain union.

How to get to Borgo Val di Taro

It has its own railway station. Parma is about 1 h 7 min away by road.

Everything we know about Borgo Val di Taro

6. Curtatone

Best for a long lunch. A food guide lists La Locanda delle Grazie here.

1 h 3 min from Parma · homes €1,100 to €1,300 a m² in the center · 14,739 people

Why visit Curtatone

Curtatone is a Mantova commune of eight frazioni in the Parco del Mincio, with its seat at Montanara and its most visited fraction at Grazie. The Santuario della Beata Vergine delle Grazie was commissioned in 1406 by Francesco I Gonzaga and stands on the edge of the Mincio's lower bend, surrounded by lotus flowers that bloom across the river in July and August.

On 29 May 1848, Tuscan and Neapolitan volunteers held this stretch of ground against Austrian forces under Radetzky long enough for the Piedmontese army to reorganize at Goito the following day. The battle is remembered nationally as Curtatone e Montanara.

Every year around Ferragosto the Antichissima Fiera delle Grazie fills the square in front of the sanctuary; since 1973 the fair has hosted the Incontro Nazionale dei Madonnari, with over a hundred chalk artists working through the night on the pavement around the church.

What to see in Curtatone

• Santuario della Beata Vergine delle Grazie. 1406 Gonzaga sanctuary on the Mincio bend, with a unique wooden ex-voto wall lining the nave, and the burial of Baldassarre Castiglione.
• Parco del Mincio. Riverine nature reserve around Grazie, with lotus flower expanses that bloom mid-July through August on the lower Mincio.
• Monument to the Battle of Curtatone and Montanara. Memorial to the 1848 stand by Tuscan and Neapolitan volunteers against Austrian forces under Radetzky on 29 May.

How to get to Curtatone

It has its own railway station. Parma is about 1 h 3 min away by road.

Everything we know about Curtatone

7. Collecchio

Best for a stage of a long walk. The Via Francigena passes through.

18 min from Parma · homes €1,400 to €1,650 a m² in the center · 14,854 people

Why visit Collecchio

Collecchio sits at 112 meters on the right bank of the Taro, thirteen kilometers southwest of Parma, on the Via Francigena and the Cisa road. In medieval documents the town appears as Colliculum, a possession of the bishops of Parma.

The centro lies on the flat valley floor, with the parish church set apart on the hill above it, and the two industrial sites, the dairy headquarters and the football training ground, occupying the built-up town rather than the countryside around it. The southern half of the municipality is given over to parkland: the regional river park along the Taro and, further out, the wooded former hunting reserve of the Dukes of Parma.

A town shaped by a bishop's holding and a pilgrim road has ended up defined by a milk company and a football club, with its church and its woods left to mark what came before.

What to see in Collecchio

• Pieve di San Prospero. The three-nave interior is reached by climbing the hill above the centro; the walls show the masonry seams of construction stretched across two centuries.
• Via Francigena. The Taro variant is marked with waystones through the centro, following the line pilgrims once walked toward the Cisa pass.
• Parco Boschi di Carrega. Wooded grounds once reserved for ducal hunting, now open with trails through the trees across the southern municipality.

How to get to Collecchio

It has its own railway station. Parma is about 18 min away by road.

Everything we know about Collecchio

8. Sasso Marconi

Best for truffle season. It belongs to the national association of truffle towns.

1 h 11 min from Parma · homes €1,700 to €2,400 a m² in the center · 14,907 people

Why visit Sasso Marconi

The Setta and Reno rivers meet below the rock that gives the town its name, at the point where the pre-Apennine hills begin their climb south of Bologna. The Sasso della Glosina dominates the bend, a Pliocene formation old enough to have shaped how the crossing below it was used long before the valley took its modern name.

The town was called Sasso Bolognese from 1935 until 1938, when it was renamed for Guglielmo Marconi, whose family estate lies in the frazione of Pontecchio, on the valley floor rather than on the rock itself. The territory reaches from that river confluence up into the Apennine slopes, and the change in elevation shows in what the land produces: white truffle from the valley floor near the Reno, and vineyards on the hills around Pieve del Pino and Mongardino, recognition earned on two different registers of the same ground.

The lower town, built around the rivers and the old road to Pistoia, and the upper slopes, given to woods and terraced vines, read as one territory doing two different kinds of work.

What to see in Sasso Marconi

• Villa Griffone - Museo Marconi. Marconi family villa in the frazione of Pontecchio. The mausoleum sits alongside the attic laboratory, and the museum holds working reproductions of his early apparatus.
• Sasso della Glosina. The rock rises directly over the river bend, its bulk visible from the crossing below and from much of the surrounding valley.
• Confluenza Setta-Reno. Meeting of the two valleys at the foot of the rock, with the historic crossing of the Via Porrettana toward Pistoia.

How to get to Sasso Marconi

It has its own railway station. Parma is about 1 h 11 min away by road.

Everything we know about Sasso Marconi

9. Vignola

1 h 5 min from Parma · homes €1,200 to €1,800 a m² in the center · 26,170 people

Why visit Vignola

Vignola sits at 125 meters on the right bank of the Panaro, twenty-five kilometers west of Bologna and twenty south of Modena, where the Modenese plain meets the Apennine foothills. The fortress there is documented from the eighth century, raised by the Abbot of Nonantola to guard the abbey's lands before the Contrari family rebuilt it in the fifteenth century as a fortified residence; in 1577 it passed to the Boncompagni-Ludovisi, who held it until 1965.

The palace beside it takes its second name from the family that acquired it, and from the architect born in the town in 1507, who died in 1573 after a career among the leading figures of late Renaissance architecture. The cherries that carry the town's name upriver and down are IGP-protected across twenty-eight communes stretching from Modena to Bologna, and the blossom that precedes the fruit each spring fills the Panaro valley below the walls.

A disused railway, now a greenway, threads through the same ground on its way between Mirandola and Bologna. The town's identity rests on this pairing of a fortified height above the river and an agricultural valley beneath it, one lineage of stone, one of orchards, both still legible in the place today.

What to see in Vignola

• Rocca di Vignola. Eighth-century origin, built to guard the lands of an abbey and later rebuilt as a fortified residence. The frescoed interiors and four corner towers stand over the river much as the rebuilding left them.
• Scala a Chiocciola di Palazzo Barozzi. The 106 steps rise with no central support, an engineering feat as much as a decorative one, tucked inside the palace next to the fortress.
• Palazzo Boncompagni. The palace passed to the family that gives it its name in the late sixteenth century and held the fortress until 1965. Its reception rooms carry frescoes alongside the staircase it is best known for.

How to get to Vignola

It has its own railway station. Parma is about 1 h 5 min away by road.

Everything we know about Vignola

10. Parma

Best for Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP. The town gives its name to Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP.

homes €1,650 to €2,450 a m² in the center · 198,693 people

Why visit Parma

Parma sits on the Via Emilia at 57 meters, halfway between Bologna and Piacenza, the Po Valley reaching north and the Apennine foothills closing in fifteen kilometers south. Under the Farnese in the sixteenth century and Marie Louise of Habsburg in the nineteenth, the city ran its own duchy and built the institutions that still define it: the Palazzo della Pilotta, the Teatro Farnese, the Teatro Regio of 1829.

The Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, consecrated in 1106, holds Correggio's Assumption fresco in the dome, painted between 1526 and 1530 with a vortex of figures that read as a single rotating body. The Battistero, octagonal in pink Veronese marble, was designed and carved by Benedetto Antelami from 1196.

Arturo Toscanini was born here in 1867; the Teatro Regio still treats his recordings as house standard. The city's two food appellations, Parmigiano Reggiano and Prosciutto di Parma, carry European protected status; UNESCO named the city a Creative City of Gastronomy in 2015.

The population is about 199,000, second in Emilia-Romagna after Bologna.

What to see in Parma

• Duomo di Parma. Cathedral consecrated 1106, holding Correggio's Assumption fresco in the dome, painted 1526 to 1530 as a single rotating vortex of figures.
• Battistero. Octagonal baptistery in pink Veronese marble, 35 meters tall, designed and sculpted by Benedetto Antelami from 1196, completed in 1270.
• Palazzo della Pilotta. Sixteenth-century Farnese palace housing the National Gallery, the Archaeological Museum and the wooden Teatro Farnese of 1618.

How to get to Parma

It has its own railway station.

Everything we know about Parma