PIACENZA, PLEASE

Who wouldn't want to return to Piacenza - its very name means 'pleasing' - but I long to go back to this quiet town in Emilia Romagna, to find out what is the charming and eccentric little Renaissance façade (above) that I photographed, hidden away behind a church. I thought it was behind S. Maria del Campagna, in which I took the pictures below, but apparently not. I couldn't resist the sunlight on the Baroque pews and geometric marble floor, below, or the incredibly vivid and action-packed frescoes painted by Pordenone in 1530, with columns crowded with trophies of music and putti, all in lifelike colours.

I went to Piacenza to see this huge building (below) the only half-built, but still vast, palace that Vignola designed, 1558-61, for Ottavio Farnese and his wife Margaret of Austria, daughter of Emperor Charles V. The half-façade is frighteningly, absurdly overscaled, especially in a small city; behind it are the beginnings of a madly ambitious courtyard/theatre which makes no sense until you see the wooden model inside the museum, whose star exhibit is the unforgettably odd Liver of Piacenza, a rare, Etruscan bronze magical device. The courtyard's fragments, towering cliffs of brickwork with fine marble detailing, are completely overwhelming, left as they were when the Farnese abandoned the project in 1602, to concentrate on the Palazzo della Pilotta in their main base, Parma (now a similarly mad, half-built relic.)