Baptistery of Parma

Walk around the building before you go in. It costs nothing and takes ten minutes.

• The Portal of the Virgin faces the square, on the north side. The lunette shows the crowned Virgin and Child. The door jambs carry two family trees of the Messiah, and the lintel is inscribed with the name of the sculptor Benedictus and the start date, 1196.
• The Portal of the Redeemer, on the west, is the main door: the works of mercy and the six ages of man on the jambs, and angels waking the dead for judgment on the lintel.
• The Portal of the Baptist, used by those preparing for baptism, has the strangest lunette: a young man in a tree eating honey while a dragon waits below and two mice gnaw the roots. It is the tale of Barlaam and Josaphat, an allegory of life ignoring death.

Around the base runs the zooforo, a band of 75 carved panels attributed to Antelami and his workshop: sirens, centaurs, griffins, unicorns, sea monsters. Four more panels show the virtues that the cathedral's guide calls the key to reading the rest.

The reason to pay is overhead. The dome was frescoed in the 1230s by painters from the Po valley working from Byzantine models. It is an umbrella vault: sixteen ribs fan out from the keystone and divide the painting into segments, stacked in six rings. Read it from the bottom up:

1. Scenes from the life of Abraham.
2. The life of John the Baptist.
3. Christ in glory with the Virgin and the Baptist, among prophets and kings.
4. The apostles and evangelists.
5. The heavenly Jerusalem with its walls.
6. The sky with fixed stars, and at the top the Empyrean, painted red.

Around the walls are sixteen deep niches with votive frescoes from the 14th and 15th centuries, by painters such as Niccolo da Reggio and Bertolino da Piacenza. In the middle is the large octagonal font for baptism by immersion, with a smaller quatrefoil basin inside it where the celebrant stood. A second font in the southwest niche, used from the 14th century, stands on a crouching lion.

Antelami's workshop carved a cycle of the twelve months and two seasons, each month shown as the work that defines it: pruning, sowing, harvesting, pressing grapes. The figures are elegant even while they labor, which the Baptistery's guide reads as an allegory of work redeemed. The cycle was never finished, and you can still see tool marks.

For centuries they sat up in the first gallery, too high to see well. The Fabbriceria's ticket page now says the cycle has been moved from the first gallery down to visitor height, so with the permit you can look at them close up. This is the single best argument for the €12. Budget ten minutes here and walk the whole row.

The same permit covers the Museo Diocesano Benedetto Antelami, in the basement of the Bishop's Palace on the square. It is small and runs in chronological order from Roman Parma through the early Middle Ages. What makes it worth the stairs:

• The original Antelami statues from the Baptistery's north door: the archangels Michael and Gabriel, King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, still showing traces of paint, and two prophets. The Michael is a rare reuse of a Roman statue, with only the head and feet recarved.
• The Angiol d'Or, the gilded copper angel, 1.42 m tall, that stood on top of the cathedral bell tower until the last century. A copy is up there now.
• A 6th-century mosaic found in 1955 under the south side of the square, with a cantharus vase, fish and dolphins.
• A stretch of late-Roman city wall from the end of the 3rd century.

The Baptistery and museum close at 6 p.m.; the free cathedral stays open until 7:20 p.m. On a short afternoon, do the Baptistery first. The Fabbriceria does not publish crowd data or a timed-entry limit, and individual visitors do not need to book a slot.

The Baptistery is still a working baptistery, and visits are suspended during ceremonies. If you arrive during one, go to the museum and come back. For a full morning on the square, pair it with San Giovanni Evangelista, directly behind the cathedral. Our historic centre loop starts here.