Basilica di Santa Maria della Steccata

A miracle-working fresco behind a wooden fence gave this church its name. On Parma's main street, the Basilica di Santa Maria della Steccata rises in the shape of a Greek cross, shelters Parmigianino's luminous Wise and Foolish Virgins, and keeps the tombs of the Farnese and Bourbon dukes beneath its floor.

Why it matters

The Steccata is the purest Renaissance statement among Parma's churches. The city tourism portal records that it was built from 1521 and consecrated in 1539 to house a Madonna image considered miraculous, which had hung in a small oratory called dello steccato, after the wooden enclosure that protected the painting; the image itself is attributed to a late fourteenth-century artist. Planned as a Greek cross with semicircular apses and square corner chapels in an elegant Bramante manner, the basilica became the magistral church of the Constantinian Order, which still owns it, and the burial place of Parma's ducal dynasties. It remains a working Marian sanctuary near Piazza Garibaldi.

What to notice

Parmigianino's unfinished fresco cycle on the arch above the presbytery, painted between 1530 and 1539, depicts the Wise and Foolish Virgins on gold and purple grounds, with monochrome figures of Eve, Aaron, Adam and Moses on the intrados. The altar below holds a fresco of the Madonna suckling the Child, transferred from the original oratory. The marble dome has a loggia and lantern; Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, in Parma from 1526, is credited with helping complete it. The left aisle holds the tomb of Count Adam Neipperg, husband of Marie Louise of Austria, carved by Lorenzo Bartolini between 1829 and 1831.

Context and history

The building grew out of late medieval devotion rather than princely whim: crowds had gathered at the oratory image until the fence, or steccato, earned the church its name. A sacristy door leads to the burial chapel built in 1823 by Marie Louise for the Farnese and Bourbon dukes of Parma, the dynasty whose monuments make the crypt a chapter of European royal history. The annexed Constantinian Museum holds the order's treasures, including vestments and fabrics from the seventeenth century onward, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century silverwork, Farnese archival documents, illuminated armorials and insignia of the order. Together church and museum explain why the Steccata, not the cathedral, is the dynastic temple of Parma.