Discover Emilia 2026-27

Dozza

It is not only the Rocca Sforzesca that makes Dozza special. This enchanting medieval village, praised by Forbes, lies in the province of Bologna and is enhanced still further by the murals and paintings that adorn the façades of its houses and make this place unique. Also known as the City of Wine, the village of Dozza houses, in the cellars of the fortress, the Regional Wine Cellar of Emilia-Romagna, with more than 1,000 labels to taste.

Castell’Arquato lies in the province of Piacenza, along the backbone of the Emilian region. If you think time machines don’t exist, you have never been to this village: so much so that, on entering Castell’Arquato, time seems to have stood still. Its medieval layout survived intact until the early 1950s. The anachronism of this village is what makes it one of the most visited in the whole region, with noteworthy cultural attractions such as the Palazzo del Podestà, the Rocca Viscontea, the Collegiate Church and many others that still seem intact despite their centuries of age. The symbol of this place’s traditions is the production of DOC wines, including Gutturnio, Bonarda and Barbera.

The Labirinto della Masone, the largest maze in the world, at Fontanellato.

“When he had his Labyrinth built, which was a prison, Minos harboured dark and cruel intentions; I imagined a gentler equivalent, one that would also be a Garden, where people could stroll, losing their way from time to time, but without danger.” Publisher, bibliophile, collector. Franco Maria Ricci, however, is above all an aesthete, who in 2015 opened to the public, on his estate at Fontanellato, his latest and most fantastic creation: the largest maze in the world. He wanted it in order to follow a passion that has accompanied him since childhood (“As a child I loved labyrinths. Then they settled and, at a certain point, they resurfaced”), but also to keep a promise made a few decades earlier to Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine writer who edited a series of books for Ricci, The Library of Babel (“I have discussed labyrinths all my life, with Italo Calvino, with Roland Barthes, with Borges,” Ricci explained. “He was obsessed with them; he cited them constantly in his stories, as in the Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, from which Bernardo Bertolucci drew his The Spider’s Stratagem. Borges stayed as a guest in my house for twenty days, in the 1980s, and it was then that I began to think of building a real labyrinth”). The Labirinto della Masone was created by planting, over twelve years and across eight hectares, no fewer than 200,000 bamboo plants, ranging in height from 30 centimetres to 15 metres and belonging to twenty different species. It is a slightly unreal but undeniably fascinating place, designed for losing and finding yourself again, among forks and dead ends. In conceiving the design of the maze Ricci drew inspiration from the mosaics of Roman villas and baths, while its perimeter, in the shape of an eight-pointed star, recalls Palmanova, a perfect example of a Renaissance fortified town. The buildings of the Labirinto della Masone, meanwhile, were designed by Pier Carlo Bontempi, the well-known Parma architect who drew on the neoclassical works of architects from the period of the French Revolution, such as the Frenchmen Boullée, Ledoux and Lequeu and the Italian Antolini, author of a visionary design for the Foro Bonaparte in Milan, never built but passed down to us in the form of a volume by Bodoni. All the buildings are made of handmade bricks, the traditional building material of the Po Valley. The maze, however, is not an end in itself but forms part of a cultural project that includes an atelier housing the headquarters of the Franco Maria Ricci publishing house, a library of 15,000 art volumes, and a museum with 500 paintings and manuscripts from Ricci’s rich and eclectic collection, laid out over five thousand square metres, with 500 works ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. There are canvases by Mannerists such as Carracci and Cambiaso, a curious series of Vanitas (still lifes with skulls, intended as a warning about the precariousness of existence), right up to more recent works by Wildt, Ligabue and Savinio.

Sabbioneta, the Gonzagas’ ideal city, is a true model of the “ideal city”. In little more than a century the Gonzagas rebuilt what had been a small fortified village according to Renaissance canons. It was Vespasiano Gonzaga who promoted its construction according to the proportions and the ideal of harmony symbolised in Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man. Between 1556 and 1591 Vespasiano Gonzaga Colonna indeed created a city unique for its urban modernisation, its palaces, its social fabric and the greatness of his house. Every building, every arrangement of streets and roads, every bastion recounts, with architectural precision and historical resonance, the culture and greatness of its prince. An intact star with six bastions at its points: this is the urban spectacle that Sabbioneta offers. There are two main gates giving access to the citadel. To the west, the oldest is Porta Vittoria, while to the east is Porta Imperiale, opened in 1579 and clad in marble. In 1544 it was Gonzaga who ordered the complete rebuilding of what had once been merely a modest fortified settlement. In accordance with the precepts of Vitruvius and of military architecture, there thus arose the walls, which still surround Sabbioneta with their hexagonal perimeter and strong bastions, and the Ducal Palace: an urban chessboard at whose centre was traced the axis that still bears the Duke’s name. The exception to the rigour of the lines is the recess at what is now Piazza Castello, due to the wish to preserve the ancient medieval fortress, demolished in 1794. It is the tangible demonstration of the harmonious and rigorous order of the city. Stand at the centre of the square and, turning through 360 degrees, your gaze will come to rest at regular intervals on the main porticoed streets. The perspective leads to the façade of the Ducal Palace and the outline of the parish church of Santa Maria Assunta, with its façade, at once elegant and sober, in white and red marble.