The cultural citadel of the north Italian city of Parma has three heroes: its composer Giuseppe Verdi, its conductor Arturo Toscanini, and its painter Correggio. Parmese people speak of their heroes as if they were still among them, promenading over the cobble-stone streets of this modern - medieval city.

La Chartreuse de Parme is Stendhal's only novel not set in the present; he chose Parma as the proper place to superimpose the past on the present. For that French writer the Renaissance "cour de Parme" was symbolic of court life in general. Parma today still reflects that confusion of time, where the past seems contemporary and at certain times and places the present is absent.

In his search for current existence in the past, Stendhal found answers in the works of his favorite painter, Correggio, who depicted even his primary figures veiled in the mist that shrouds Parma many months of the year, so that they too seem to be distant. Convinced that no Frenchman could understand Correggio and his time, Stendhal in his writing transposed Correggio to literature and the painter's 16th century Parma to the Napoleonic era.

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  The Parma visitor ascends the great staircase of the magnificent Palazzo Pilotta, built by the alchemist, sensualist, Hamlet-like, first Farnese Duke of Parma, Ranuccio I. He moves toward the entrance to, he believes, one of Italy's newest, ultra-modern art gallery. But instead he steps into a huge incomprehensible space from somewhere in the past. The visitor stops abruptly, startled, astonished and disoriented. The silent and apparently deserted relic of the past is a veritable coup de theatre.

The ghostly Farnese Theater in the bowels of the Palazzo Pilotta today serves as an entrance -- and obligatory initiation -- to Parma's Art Gallery that begins far behind the vast stage you see rising up sixty meters away. Ghostly too, because until a few years ago the theater had been mostly closed ever since its triumphant opening on December 21, 1628 to celebrate the matrimonial link of the Farnese Dukes of Parma with the Medici of Florence.

The new 17th century theater astounded aristocratic Europe who attended its inauguration: a six-hour performance of "Mercury and Mars" with the music of Monteverdi, featuring the best voices of the epoch, spectacular stage machines, battles on the water-filled arena and all the gods of Olympus. It was a Renaissance colossal that caused echoes in the chronicles of the era. That's what state visits were about.

Even before it opened, the Farnese Theater project was famous, a Bible for all theaters: many attributed its plans to Palladio or Bernini; the Vienna Royal Opera copied its loges; and later Paris theaters studied the Parma Baroque stage experience.

Yet, although it was hailed as "the most majestic theater in Europe," the Farnese was chiefly an object of visual art. For soon after its opening, the decadence of the great Farnese family began and performances were rare. Crazy things happened in the aristocratic world. The theater was closed for over two hundred years before hosting celebrations for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Verdi in 1913.

Then when a bomb destroyed the Farnese Theater in World War II, it seemed finally kaput. But by 1962, the Parmese, insecure without their theater, had restored it only to let it again stand silent and abandoned in the center of rich Parma like some kind of toy for giants.

Today it appears as an empty shell, a spirit from the past. But in reality it was always a shell. It was born classical. Its original space was 87 meters long, 12 wide and 22 high. And all in wood. Seventeenth century spectators sat in the loges, not on the gradine. Actors occupied the stage, the arena in the center, and the steps. It was a Renaissance theater of illusions, a labyrinth where actors and spectators were confused, where painted figures of princes melded in with real ones, and images of actors painted on the ceiling looked down on themselves performing in the arena. A game of mirrors. One was both on the inside and outside. A confusion of theater and life.

The visitor today is no less stunned. Despite 360 years of near solitude, the Farnese Theater conserves traces of an antiquity that Stendhal painted onto his Parma. And not even spectators in the arena today nor earlier concerts by the Arturo Toscanini Orchestra eliminate the mystery of the Farnese Theater.

Passing beyond the great stage but still within the Palazzo Pilotta complex, one leaves the past for the present of the super modern National Gallery. Parma's gallery is unique in Italy: scientifically controlled temperature, light and moisture, and an interior architecture that underlines the historical unity of the palazzo and art works. It is a traditional museum in dynamic form that makes a visit adventurous and provocative.

Disaster struck Parma in the 18th century when the Farnese art collection was transferred to Naples when Don Carlos of Bourbon moved there. But successive Bourbon dukes, the government of Maria Louisa of Hapsburg and a newly established academy assembled a new collection in Parma; the Royal Gallery of Art was born. Highlighted by the works of Antonio Allegri, known as Correggio, Parma's National Art Gallery is one of Italy's most important -- Correggio, Parmigianino, the Carracci's, Beato Angelico, Guercino, Dossi, El Greco, Leonardo, and Hans Holbein's "Erasmus of Rotterdam." The Flemish influence in Italy is represented in works by Brueghel, De Heem, Stork, Boudewyns, Anton Van Dick.

The Flemish School left another mystery in Parma: the world's only painting signed by the enigmatic Josaphat Araldi, a "San Sebastian." The only other trace of this late 16th century painter of strong Flemish influence is one attributed to him in Belgium. The city of Parma offers a Correggio itinerary from his works in the gallery to his frescoed "Assumption of the Virgin" in the cupola of the Romanesque cathedral and in the cupola of the Church of San Giovanni -- flanked by Parmigianino's three chapels - to his frescoes in the "Room of Saint Paul."

Medieval Parma became one of the jewels on Italy's famous Via Emilia, leading from Milan southeast to Rimini on the Adriatic. Renaissance Parma was always a capital city of churches, museums and palaces, all adorned with quality art. The city was governed by aristocratic families like the Farnese from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Then for two hundred years it was marked by French influence, when the upper classes spoke French and Parisian manners and tastes prevailed.