Galleria nazionale di Parma

Parma's national gallery is folded into the Palazzo della Pilotta, the huge brick pile the Farnese dukes threw up to hold the machinery of their court. You reach the paintings by walking through the palace's greatest surprise, the Teatro Farnese, a vast wooden theatre built in 1618 that seats thousands and was almost never used, rebuilt after wartime bombing flattened it.

The collection belongs to Parma. Its two home-grown geniuses dominate: Correggio, whose soft figures seem lit from within, and Parmigianino, whose elegant, elongated saints defined a whole Mannerist taste. The single most famous sheet, though, is a small unfinished head by Leonardo da Vinci, 'La Scapigliata', a young woman with tousled hair emerging from bare brown ground.

Because the gallery shares the Pilotta with an archaeology museum, a great library and a printing museum, one ticket in Parma walks you from a Baroque theatre through Leonardo and Correggio and out among Roman bronzes.