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The Duomo

The Duomo is considered one of the best examples of 12th century Romanesque architecture in Italy. Work began in the 11th century by order of Pope Honorius II, and it was completed between 1130 and 1178. The façade features three orders of loggias and is flanked by a tall gothic brick tower. The presbytery stands exactly on the crypt and is above the floor level. The dome contains Correggio’s famous depiction of the Virgin’s Assumption, widely viewed as one of the most inventive and influential frescos of the Renaissance. The Venetian painter Titian famously said of it, “Turn the dome upside down and fill it with gold and even so, you will still not have paid a just price for it.” In the mid-19th century, Charles Dickens visited the cathedral and had quite a different impression:

This cathedral is odorous with the rotting of Correggio's frescoes in the Cupola. Heaven knows how beautiful they may have been at one time. Connoisseurs fall into raptures with them now; but such a labyrinth of arms and legs: such heaps of fore- shortened limbs, entangled and involved and jumbled together: no operative surgeon, gone mad, could imagine in his wildest delirium.

Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy, 1846.