Antica Corte Pallavicina Relais

Most people come for dinner, and the room is how they avoid the drive back. Here is what a night for two costs on the relais's own figures:

• Room: €190 to €280 for most doubles, breakfast included.
• Dinner: both tasting menus are €150 per person. One is built around culatello aged 18, 27, 40 and 42 months; it can be paired with Krug Champagne at €300 (one bottle for two). Glass-by-glass wine pairings are €55 or €130 per person.
• Museum: the Museo del Culatello e del Masalén is €7 with an audio guide in English, plus €3 for the castle and €8 for a culatello tasting.

A standard room, two tasting menus and the €55 pairing comes to about €600 for two, before any local tourist tax, which we could not confirm for Polesine Zibello. That is the honest price of the pilgrimage.

The relais is explicit: a room booking covers the night and breakfast only, and gives no priority on a table at the gourmet restaurant or at the Hosteria del Maiale. Say which you want when you book the room.

Check the calendar too. The gourmet restaurant is closed all day Monday and at lunch on Tuesday and Wednesday. The Hosteria del Maiale, the bistro in the old barn beside the museum, is open every day. A Monday night stay means dinner at the Hosteria, not the tasting menu.

The 12 rooms are in two wings. The Castle Wing has a lift and six rooms (suites, superiors and standards) under a 16th-century coffered ceiling, with ornamental fireplaces and large bathtubs. The Foresteria wing, over the old hay barn and reached by stairs, has six plainer rooms, junior suites and standards in wood and linen. Every room has air conditioning, a safe, a minibar, an espresso machine and a kettle.

Check-in runs from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m., and the relais warns that later arrivals lose the booking. On a foggy November evening from Parma, leave margin.

Polesine is about 38 km (24 miles) from Parma station, roughly 45 minutes by car on OpenStreetMap routing, through the flat Bassa. You need a car or a driver; the relais lists a private hire (NCC) service for transfers. Pair it with Busseto and Verdi's country nearby, or with our culatello cellar tasting guide.

Food travellers with a car who have booked the tasting menu and want to wake up by the river, walk the 1.5 km Po Forest trail the museum maintains, and see the cellars before driving on. Couples marking an occasion.

It is the wrong base for sightseeing in Parma: 45 minutes each way by car, and you need the car or a hired driver to get there. Do Parma from a city hotel and add this as one night at the end, ideally not a Monday.