Sanctuary of Santa Maria della Steccata

The Shrine of Santa Maria della Steccata is a Greek-cross design Renaissance church in central Parma, Italy.

By 1492, the Knights of Malta built a small oratory here to house a putatively miraculous icon depicting Saint John the Baptist.

[2] The architects were Bernardino Zaccagni and his son, Giovanni Francisco, with modifications by Gian Francesco d'Agrate, who also worked on the statuary gracing the roof-line.

[4] The layout is that mainly of a centralized Greek Cross church with four arms, although the entrance elongates through an arch to form the Coro dei Cavallieri.

A mannerist Redeemer with St. Anthony of Padua and the Magdalen was painted by Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli, based on a commission from 1605 for the price of 60 ducats and 76 soldi.

The church contains funeral monuments of Bertrando Rossi, Ottavio Farnese, Sforzino Sforza, and Adam Albert von Neipperg (by Lorenzo Bartolini).

On 28 August 2010, the body of Carlos Hugo, Duke of Parma, former Head of the House of Bourbon-Parma between 1977 and 2010 and ex-husband of Princess Irene of the Netherlands, was interred in the crypt.