Parma's lavish commemoration of the centennial of Verdi's birth took to an extreme the post-Unification trend to memorialize great figures of Italy's past. This essay examines the encyclopedic nature of the commemoration in the context of the local and national political climate. Its reception and display were symptomatic of contemporary changes in the physical sites of politics, sharing features with later, more overtly nationalist exhibitions and suggesting a symbiotic relationship between culture and ideology. The reception history of the monument to Verdi built on this occasion, however, warns against historical generalizations, underlining the contingency of the interactions between art, politics and ideology, and demonstrating that current concerns with nationalism often obscure more than they clarify.