Busseto

The town sits twenty-five kilometers northwest of Parma, in the flat farming country of the Bassa Parmense between the Po and the Apennine foothills. It was the capital of the Stato Pallavicino for almost five hundred years before the territory was absorbed into the Duchy of Parma, and the fortress built for that state still anchors the main piazza today. Roncole, the frazione where Verdi was born, lies three kilometers east; he moved into Busseto proper as a boy in 1824, and Villa Sant'Agata, the house he later bought and kept until his death, lies five kilometers north of the center.

The three places trace a line outward from the town: birth to the east, boyhood at the center, and the household of his adult life to the north. The Bassa around the town is also farming country in a more literal sense, producing the Culatello di Zibello and the Parmigiano Reggiano that the local consortium has aged here since the nineteenth century. A small provincial capital, in other words, whose built center was shaped by one family's rule and whose long afterlife has been shaped by one composer's, with the surrounding plain supplying the food economy underneath both.

From Bologna (BLQ), about 1h 28m by car.

Milan (BGY) is about 1h 32m away.

By car from the centre of Parma 38 minutes or Brescia 1 hour.

There is a railway station in the comune, so you can arrive without a car.

Coming from Milan, Bologna or Verona?

Coming by train into Parma? Busseto is about 36 minutes away by road.

Every town within reach of Bologna airport.