Begun in 1561 by Ottavio Farnese, who needed to establish a fixed base for the court of his Duchy of Parma and Piacenza. He chose a site near a turret designed by the Sforza and commissioned Jacopo Barozzi to design it and Giovanni Francesco Testa to manage the building work. It was based on the Farnese family's contemporary buildings in Florence and Rome, including the Palazzo Farnese and Villa Farnese. The palace's decorative scheme was commissioned from artists such as Girolamo Mirola, Jacopo Zanguidi, Agostino Carracci, Carlo Cignani, Jan Soens, Cesare Baglioni, Giovanni Battista Trotti and Luca Reti. The building was already being modified and extended early in the 17th century, firstly by Simone Moschino and then by Girolamo Rainaldi, who added courtyards and side wings added to the original rectangular floorplan. Giovanni Boscoli designed a huge fountain in front of the new palace, with several statues and water features - Vitellozzo Vitelli argued in a letter to Pico della Mirandola that it was superior to that at the Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola. The palace reached its greatest magnificence during the reign of Ranuccio I Farnese, but was abandoned little by little under his son Odoardo I Farnese, distracted from court life by military campaigns. The ducal court used it until the second half of the 17th century, when they moved to other palaces alongside Palazzo della Pilotta. In the 1680s and 1690s the new duke Ranuccio II Farnese started renovating the palace and the ducal gardens. In the 17th century these renovations were mainly to designs by the French architect Ennemond Alexandre Petitot, who also demolished the fountain, which had become insanitary. After Italian unification the palace became home to an infantry training school. It was badly damaged in an air raid during the Second World War. On 9 September 1943 the school's commander colonel Gaetano Ricci refused German demands to surrender, leading to a battle which the Germans won after calling in armoured vehicles, with five dead and twenty wounded on the Italian side, now commemorated by a marble plaque on the palazzo. The building was left open to vandals after the battle, leaving it devastated by the war's end. Post-war rebuilding became entangled in bureacracy even after the Palazzo became a base for the Comando della Legione of the Carabinieri - reconstruction work on the completely-destroyed south-west wing only began in 1959 and was completed in 1968. A number of restoration and improvement projects have occurred since 2004, some with lottery funding.
Artworks
On the ground floor are works by the early 17th-century artist Cesare Baglioni. A monumental 17th-century staircase leads to a large salone on the first floor, named the Sala degli Uccelli after its stucco and fresco decoration of 224 species of birds by Benigno Bossi. Other rooms open off this salone - they house various frescoes and stucco-work from the Farnese era:
Sala di Alcina - The earliest room in the palace, with c.1568 frescoes by Girolamo Mirola, with collaboration from Jacopo Zanguidi, showing scenes from book VI of Orlando Furioso
Sala dell'Aetas Felicior - Fresco by Zanguidi, 1570-1573, with scenes of Venus and Cupid; named after the Latin inscription Aetas Felicior on the frame running along the ceiling and the dancing scene with a kiss glimpsed among crystal columns, a typical creation of late Mannerism, where the space is exploited as a means of naturalistic illusion.
Sala d'Orfeo - Frescoes by Mirola and Zanguidi, 1568-1570, with scenes of the love story of Orpheus between architectonic figures.
Sala di Erminia - Frescoes by the Bolognese artist Alessandro Tiarini, 1628, with scenes from Gerusalemme liberata and stucco work of tangled branches by Carlo Bossi.
Sala dell'Amore - Ceiling frescoes by Agostino Carracci showing maternal love, heavenly love and human love ; he died in 1602, leaving the work to be completed in 1679-80 by Carlo Cignani with other scenes on the theme of love.
Sala delle leggende - The window side of the room shows two frescoes by the Flemish artist Jan Soens, whilst the other three sides have 1604-1619 frescoes by Giovan Battista Trotti.
