The last marchioness of this castle left behind two things: her rooms exactly as she lived in them, and Italy's only museum of Freemasonry.
Compiano castle holds the only international Museum of Freemasonry in Italy: regalia, medals, vestments and paintings from English eighteenth and nineteenth-century symbolism, alongside Italian material.
Next to it is the apartment of the marchioness Lina Raimondi Gambarotta, the castle's last inhabitant, who restored it and left it as a museum: fifteenth-century ceilings, seventeenth-century floors, tapestries. Guided visits only, ten euros.
Genoa (GOA) is about 110 kilometres, an hour and forty. Bologna (BLQ) about 180 kilometres, two hours. The train works: Borgo Val di Taro station on the Pontremolese line is nine kilometres away.
The castle is by guided visit and appointment only: arriving without calling means finding it shut. The village itself is one street and a square, an hour at most. Most of the beds are in Borgotaro. The Parma Apennines are cold and bare in winter and much of it closes.
Sources: tuttitalia.it/emilia-romagna/53-compiano/ ; parmawelcome.it/scheda/castello-di-compiano/
Each town is a day. The order of the drives, the nights and the meals is the part that ruins most first trips to small Italy. Twelve of them in one guide, free, and a letter a week after that.
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