Casa del Suono

Most of what you see before the mid-20th century comes from the Patane collection. Giovanni Patane, born in Sicily in 1924, was parish priest at Gaione outside Parma for twenty years and began collecting radios and playback machines in the 1960s. After his death in 2000 the collection went to Italy's national inter-university telecommunications consortium, CNIT, which has lent most of it to the city's Casa della Musica since 2007. It counts about 400 pieces.

The display runs chronologically, and the museum says its aim is to trace the social as much as the technical story:

• early phonographs and crystal radios from the late 19th and early 20th centuries;
• gramophones and mid-century radio sets;
• tape recorders, then compact disc players and portable digital players, from later donations and the Casa della Musica's own holdings.

The setting helps. Seeing ranks of wooden radio cabinets under a baroque church vault is half the point of coming.

The museum is also a working sound lab, run with the University of Parma. Two installations are the reason to come rather than just look at old radios:

• The sound chandelier (lampadario sonoro) hangs over the listener and creates virtual sound sources that move through the space above you.
• The Sala Bianca, a white room built for a spatial-sound system. In March 2026 it was named after Angelo Farina, whom the city calls one of the leading innovators in international acoustics.

Both use wave field synthesis, a technique developed in its final form in the 1980s, and the museum describes them as its first application in a public space. Since December 2024 visitors can also try the scettro sonoro, a hand-held controller commissioned by the Casa della Musica that lets you steer virtual sound objects around the room.

Ask at the desk when the installations are running. They are also used for concerts and research, so what you hear depends on the day.

Families, engineers, audiophiles and anyone who grew up with a transistor radio. A wind-up gramophone may hold a child's attention longer than another altarpiece. If you have one day in Parma, you can skip it; the Pilotta and the Duomo come first. If you have two or three days, it is an easy 45 minutes on the way between the Duomo and San Francesco del Prato.

The natural pairing is Toscanini's birthplace, across the river in the Oltretorrente: sound reproduction here, the conductor whose recordings defined an era there. Our music walk joins them with the Teatro Regio, where a Casa della Musica ticket gets you the €8 tour rate.

Around the corner at Piazzale San Francesco 1, in Palazzo Cusani, the Casa della Musica runs the Museo dell'Opera. It tells four centuries of opera in Parma, from 1600 to 1900, through photographs, posters and objects from the historic archive of the Teatro Regio, and follows opera's shift from a court entertainment to a public show. It is on the same €4 single ticket and the same city pass. We did not find its current opening hours published separately; ask at the Casa del Suono desk. If you are doing one, do both: together they take about an hour and a half.

Reduced rates cover over-65s, ages 19 to 25, university students and members of FAI and the Touring Club, among others. With the Camera di San Paolo closed for restoration until an expected spring 2027 reopening, the pass pays only if you visit four or more of the other civic museums. Tickets are sold at the civic museum desks and online through the city's Ticketlandia page.