My private Italy: A castle on every hill, from medieval rivalries to luxury hotels

A few years ago I was driving a small group of guests from Parma towards the hills, and one of them, a retired engineer from Ohio with a very methodical mind, decided to count the castles he could see from the window. By the time we reached Torrechiara, he had given up. “Marcello,” he said, “who on earth needed this many castles?”

It is a very good question. Nobody agrees on the exact number of castles, fortresses and fortified villages in Italy, because nobody agrees on what to count, but the estimates run into the tens of thousands. Hardly is there a hilltop between the Alps and Sicily without a few old stones on it, and behind each of them a story of fear, ambition, love, or simple neighbourly hatred. So let’s try to answer my engineer properly.

Why Italy has so many castles: a peninsula of little states

For most of its history, Italy was not a country but a crowded patchwork of kingdoms, duchies, republics, papal territories and tiny lordships, some no bigger than a valley. And every border, however small, needed defending.

The story begins around the tenth century, when Saracen pirates attacked the coasts and Hungarian horsemen raided the north. Local lords, bishops and abbots fortified the hilltops, and peasants moved inside the walls. Historians call this incastellamento, quite literally “encastlement”, and it reshaped the Italian landscape forever. Along the coasts, from the Amalfi Coast to Sicily, a chain of watchtowers kept an eye on the sea.

A clear logic emerged. The cities protected themselves with mighty walls. Outside them, castles scattered across the countryside as outposts of control: they watched over a road, a river crossing, or a border, collected tolls, and warned the city of approaching enemies. You will often hear Italians say rocca rather than castello: a rocca is a fortress built for war, while a castello also became a home for its lord. As I always tell my guests, a rocca is simply a castle that never had time to relax.

From Communes to Signorie: who built them

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, central and northern Italian cities freed themselves from emperors and bishops and began governing themselves as communes run by merchants and guilds. Every commune wanted to control its countryside, the contado, which fed the city and paid its taxes. So, they bought, conquered or built castles all around them, and fought endlessly with the next city doing exactly the same.

Then, little by little, the communes fell into the hands of powerful families: the Visconti in Milan, the Este in Ferrara, the Gonzaga in Mantua, the Montefeltro in Urbino, the Medici in Florence. This was the age of the Signorie, roughly from the late 13th to the 16th century. A lord needed a fortress to protect himself from enemies outside the walls, and often from his own subjects inside them. And, as we will see, he soon wanted that fortress to be beautiful.

Florence, Siena and Arezzo: the Tuscan castles of an endless rivalry

Nowhere is this rivalry clearer than in Tuscany. In 1260 the Sienese crushed the Florentines at Montaperti, a battle so bloody that the great poet Dante wrote of the river Arbia running red. In 1289 Florence beat Arezzo at Campaldino, where the same young cavalryman Dante fought in the front line. Arezzo lost its independence in 1384, when Florence simply bought it. Siena held out until the terrible siege of 1554–55.

The perfect symbol of this long war is Monteriggioni, a few kilometres north of Siena, built by the Sienese between 1213 and 1219 as a sentinel facing Florence: a ring of walls crowned with fourteen towers, still almost intact. Dante compared the giants of Hell to its towers: “Monteriggion di torri si corona”, “Monteriggioni crowns itself with towers”. It never fell to an assault; in 1554, so the story goes, its captain simply opened the gates.

Between the two cities lies the Chianti, dotted with castles such as Brolio and Meleto, once border fortresses and now wine estates. Here they tell my favourite legend. To settle the border, a knight would ride out from each city at the first crow of the cock, and the line would be drawn where they met. Siena fed its white rooster well; Florence starved its black one. The hungry bird crowed long before dawn, and the Florentine knight met his rival only a few miles from Siena. A legend, of course. But the black rooster is still on every bottle of Chianti Classico.

Emperors in the South: the Norman and Swabian castles of Puglia and Sicily

In the south there were no proud communes, but a strong kingdom, first under the Normans and then under their heirs, the Swabian Hohenstaufen. The greatest builder of all was Frederick II, stupor mundi, the wonder of the world, who ruled southern Italy in the first half of the thirteenth century. He restored or raised dozens of fortresses: the Swabian Castle of Bari, the castle of Trani with its feet in the sea, Melfi, where he issued his great code of laws in 1231, the Castello Maniace in Syracuse. And his masterpiece, the mysterious octagon of Castel del Monte, whose story I have told in Castel del Monte, the stone crown of Puglia.

Love, frescoes and moats in the Po Valley: Torrechiara, Vignola and Fontanellato

Back north, between Parma and Modena, the stories become more romantic. Torrechiara, in the hills south of Parma, was built between 1448 and 1460 by Pier Maria Rossi for his beloved Bianca Pellegrini, who had left her husband to follow him. In their bedroom, the Camera d’Oro, Bianca appears dressed as a pilgrim, travelling from castle to castle across her lover’s lands, and their two hearts are joined by a motto that still makes my guests sigh: Digne et in aeternum, “worthily and forever”.

The Rocca di Vignola, near Modena, was given in 1401 to Uguccione Contrari, who turned it into an elegant home and filled his chapel with late Gothic frescoes by an artist known only as the Master of Vignola. And at Fontanellato, in the plain north-west of Parma, the Rocca Sanvitale still rises from its moat, full of water, like a castle in a children’s book. Inside, a young Parmigianino painted the myth of Diana and Actaeon around 1523, and in one tower an old optical chamber projects the life of the square outside onto a wall in the dark.

The gatekeeper of the Alps: Forte di Bard

At the entrance of the Aosta Valley stands the colossal Forte di Bard. In May 1800 Napoleon crossed the Great St Bernard with some forty thousand men, and the old castle of Bard, with a tiny garrison, held him up for about two weeks. Furious, he called it the “vilain castel de Bard” and had it razed to the ground. The House of Savoy rebuilt it between 1830 and 1838, and among the young officers posted there was Camillo Benso, the future Count of Cavour. And in 2014 it even appeared in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

When the castle became a palace: Ferrara, Mantua and Urbino

By the fifteenth century, the great lords wanted not only to be safe, but to be admired. In Ferrara, the Castello Estense was begun in 1385 after the people rebelled against heavy taxes and murdered the official who collected them: the Este lord wanted a moat between himself and his subjects. Within a century, those walls enclosed one of the most refined courts in Europe.

In Mantua, inside the Gonzaga’s Castle of San Giorgio, Andrea Mantegna painted the Camera degli Sposi between 1465 and 1474. Look up: a painted oculus opens onto the sky, and ladies of the court and mischievous cherubs peer down at you, next to a pot of plants that seems about to fall on your head. In Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro, a professional soldier, built a palace so harmonious that Baldassarre Castiglione called it a city in the form of a palace. From the valley its slender towers look like a fortress; inside, his tiny studiolo is covered in inlaid wood that creates the illusion of open cupboards, books and instruments.

The Pope’s last refuge: Castel Sant’Angelo and the Sack of Rome

Castel Sant’Angelo, in Rome, was not born as a castle but as the mausoleum of the emperor Hadrian. Legend says that in 590, during a plague, Pope Gregory the Great saw the Archangel Michael on its summit sheathing his sword, and the bronze angel still stands there today. The popes turned it into a fortress, linked to the Vatican by the Passetto di Borgo, an elevated corridor about eight hundred metres long.

On 6 May 1527 that corridor saved a pope’s life. A mutinous imperial army stormed Rome, and on the steps of St Peter’s the Swiss Guard fought to the end: of 189 men, 147 died. Their sacrifice gave Clement VII just enough time to run along the Passetto and shut himself inside the castle. During the Sack of Rome he remained a prisoner there for about seven months, until in December he slipped away in disguise to Orvieto. To this day, new Swiss Guards swear their oath every 6 May.

Sleeping in a castle in Italy: three castles where I would gladly spend the night

Wars ended, borders moved, and many countryside fortresses simply crumbled. Then families, winemakers and passionate hoteliers began to restore them, and a good number are now among the most beautiful luxury hotels in Italy. Here are three I love.

In Friuli, among the vineyards of the Collio, the Castello di Spessa dates back to the thirteenth century and had a famous guest: in 1773 Giacomo Casanova stayed here and praised its wines in his memoirs.

In the heart of the Chianti, the Castello del Nero is a twelfth-century manor that belonged to the Florentine Del Nero family and, from 1825, to the Torrigiani. Today it offers frescoed suites, a celebrated spa and a view that sits quite literally on the old front line of the black rooster.

In Puglia, near the tip of Italy’s heel, the Castello di Ugento stands on the remains of a Norman fortress. It has only a handful of rooms and a cookery school devoted to Apulian cuisine.

Italy’s castles were born from fear: of pirates and invaders, of rival cities, of the neighbour on the next hill. Centuries later, that fear has turned into something far gentler. The towers that once watched for enemies now watch over vineyards, the old cellars hold wine again instead of weapons, and the great halls echo with travellers’ voices instead of soldiers’ boots. Every castle still has its story to tell, of love, ambition or simple stubbornness, and the best way to hear it is from inside its walls. Come and find your own, there is one on every hill.

Ciao da Marcello

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