Presentation

Palazzo Sanvitale is located in downtown Parma between the church of San Vitale and the City Hall, and its first known owner was Alessandro Sanvitale, who died in 1646; it was inherited by his eldest son Luigi and later by Luigi's son Alessandro, a man of great culture and generosity who in 1688 purchased from Duke Ranuccio II Farnese the theater called the Rocchetta, that added considerably to the size of the Palazzo.

Probably built from an aggregation of several existing buildings, in its current aspect it is the result of several rebuildings and expansions up to its last great transformation at the hands of the architect A. Rasori, to a project drawn up by D. Cossetti, around 1787. The plan of the ancient building was taken up again by Rasori in the large elevation drawn prior to its complete restoration. This reconstruction work was commissioned at the time of the marriage of Stefano, the count's eldest son, and involved the work of many famous artists, testifying to the magnificence and power of the Sanvitale family.

The Palace, embellished over the years with frescoes (some of which have been attributed to Sebastiano Galeotti) and plaster decorations (including some by the Albertolli brothers and G.B. Cousinet), was sold in 1932 by the last representative of the line, the engineer Giovanni Sanvitale (1872-1951), to the Daughters of the Cross sisters, also known as the Order of San Carlo, who ran it as a girls' boarding school until 1978. It was then purchased for the offices of the Presidency and Directors of the Monte di Parma Bank, that undertook major restoration work starting in 1979 with research and many interesting findings terminating, for the first stage, in 1988. Some work still remains to be done on the north side of the complex.