The moated castle and Parmigianino's fresco
In the centre of Fontanellato, a small town in the plain north west of Parma, the Rocca Sanvitale rises directly from the water of a wide moat, a fairy-tale image of a medieval castle with towers, battlements and a drawbridge, reflected in the water. It belonged for over five centuries, from the fourteenth century until 1948, to the Sanvitale family, counts of Fontanellato, who transformed the fortress into a refined residence, which still preserves furniture, paintings, weapons and objects of the family.
Its greatest treasure is a small room on the ground floor: the Saletta di Diana e Atteone, frescoed around 1523-1524 by the young Parmigianino, one of the masters of Mannerism, then just twenty years old, at the request of Count Galeazzo Sanvitale and his wife Paola Gonzaga. On the vault and the lunettes he painted the myth of Diana and Actaeon from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the hunter who surprised the goddess bathing and was turned into a deer and torn apart by his own dogs, under a pergola of branches with putti, in a style of refined elegance; the room, perhaps intended as a bathroom, may also be linked to the loss of a child of the counts. The castle also has a curious optical chamber, an ingenious system of prisms and lenses from the nineteenth century that projects live images of the square outside onto a wall in a dark room. In front of the castle, the Sanctuary of the Beata Vergine del Santo Rosario is a popular pilgrimage destination.
Tip: the castle is open every day; nearby, the Labirinto della Masone is just a few minutes away.
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