LETTER FORM ROME / Paddy Agnew: Around the square adjacent to Parma train station, there are some elegant old shops that have preserved a turn-of-the-century-style interior of dark oak panels, shiny brass handles and rows of drawers.
Walk into one of these shops on a hot summer's day and you step into a cooler climate, back into an age of respectability and gentility where elegantly dressed ladies looked long and hard at the various hams hanging from the ceiling before leaving their orders.
As you drive into Parma, it is difficult not to be struck by the wealth of the fertile, flat landscape, marked out by symmetrical lines of poplars and irrigation canals. This is land that has been carefully cultivated for centuries, land that has made Parma famous as a food centre and producer of hams, "parmigiano" cheese and good flour for pasta. This is land that was immortalised by one of Parma's most famous sons, film director Bernardo Bertolucci, in the opening scenes of his epic Novecento, or 1900.
From Etruscan times, through periods when it was under Vatican and then Bourbon control, Parma has always been an important market town. There has always been wealth in these parts. Walk around the elegant town and you discover not only the Romanesque "duomo" (cathedral) but also the city's opera house, the Teatro Regio, testament both to a flourishing bourgeoisie and to the memory of another famous son of Parma, the composer Giuseppe Verdi.
Food has always been a serious business in Parma. The banks run their own freezer units to store the famous hams and cheeses placed there as collateral. To some in Parma, it seemed only logical that the EU should have recently decided to base its much-heralded Food Safety Agency in their town.
Indeed, followers of EU matters may well recall the scornful manner in which Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi two years ago rejected the idea of basing the agency in Helsinki. The Finns, he said, "know nothing about proscuitto \".
The good burghers of Parma would agree entirely. To say that the town of Parma is this week "in crisis" following the collapse of the Parma-based, multinational dairy giant Parmalat would perhaps be an exaggeration - but only because the good burghers do not lend themselves to Latin-style histrionics. The point about Parma is that its industrious inhabitants have, temperamentally, long been more akin to Zurich than to Palermo, more Swiss than Sicilian in terms of work ethic.
The people of Parma have not much enjoyed the unwelcome publicity attracted by their town over the holiday period.
The €10 billion collapse of Parmalat, amid allegations of creative accountancy, if not systematic book-fiddling on a global scale, sticks in the burghers' craws.
Rather than think about Calisto Tanzi, the self-made boss of the now-ruined Parmalat empire, people in Parma prefer to recall another famous industrial son, namely the late Pietro Barilla, member of a Barilla pasta dynasty, which opened its first plant in Parma back in 1910.
People still remember how Barilla would ride around Parma on his bicycle, even though he had recently bought back the family business (at the time reckoned to have a €125 million turnover) from the US entrepreneur W.R. Grace.
In terms of the town's amour propre, the Parmalat collapse is as bad as it gets. After all, the rise and rise of Calisto Tanzi - from small-time salami producer in Parma in the early 1960s to boss of an empire that controlled 148 plants in 31 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and North and South America - was the perfect local success story.
Now the town has discovered that Tanzi, who was well known for his willingness to help out with charitable concerns, who was on friendly terms with a former Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, as well as with former Christian Democrat prime minister Giuseppe De Mita, may well have presided over one of the greatest corporate scams of all time.
Parma-born writer Alberto Bevilacqua sums up the feelings of his fellow citizens: "One of the city's flagbearers has fallen and this is a most unfortunate development. But beyond a sense of bitter disappointment, there is also a sense of reserve."
Those who invested in Parmalat bonds (in particular those Parmalat workers who invested their life savings, convinced of the company's sound standing) may not quite see it like that, but "a sense of reserve" is indeed the Parma way. Or at least it was until the Parmalat collapse.