My private Italy: Castel del Monte, the stone crown of Puglia

If you are travelling in Italy, there is a good chance you are carrying a small copper coin worth one euro cent, and on its face, stamped in miniature, is the building I want to tell you about today. Millions of people hold it every day without looking at it. Very few ever go to see the real thing.

And yet, the first time you see it, you never forget it. You drive across The Murge, the high, stony plateau north-west of Bari, among wheat fields, dry-stone walls and the occasional flock of sheep, and suddenly there it is, alone on a hill, visible from kilometres away: a pale octagon of stone, perfectly regular, with a tower at every corner. It does not look like a castle. It looks like a crown someone has put down on the landscape and forgotten to pick up.

Here we are at Castel del Monte, built by the most extraordinary ruler of the Middle Ages, and, after almost eight centuries, still one of the great unsolved puzzles of Italian history. Let’s walk up the hill together.

An emperor they called “The Wonder of the World”

To understand the castle, you first have to meet the man. Frederick II of Hohenstaufen was born in 1194 in Jesi, in the Marche, grandson of Frederick Barbarossa on one side and of the Norman kings of Sicily on the other. Orphaned as a child, he grew up in Palermo, a city where Latin, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew were spoken in the same streets, and it shaped him for life. He became King of Sicily, King of Germany, Holy Roman Emperor and even King of Jerusalem, and his contemporaries, half admiring and half terrified, called him stupor mundi, the wonder of the world.

He spoke several languages, surrounded himself with Arab mathematicians, Jewish translators and Christian poets, founded the University of Naples in 1224, and wrote, personally, a treatise on falconry, the De arte venandi cum avibus, still admired by ornithologists today. He was excommunicated more than once and argued with popes all his life. And of all the lands he ruled, from the Baltic to Sicily, the one he loved most was Puglia. He filled it with castles, more than a dozen of which you can still visit, from Bari to Trani to Lucera. But none of them is like this one.

A castle that defends nothing

The first document we have is dated 29 January 1240. From his camp in central Italy, Frederick ordered one of his officials in Puglia to prepare the materials for a castrum near the church of Santa Maria del Monte, which gave the building its name. Work went on for about ten years. Frederick died in December 1250, and historians still debate whether the castle was ever fully finished, and whether the emperor ever slept a single night inside it.

Here’s the part that surprises most people on our tours. Look at it with the eyes of a soldier, and Castel del Monte makes no sense at all. There is no moat, no drawbridge, no real walls around it. There are no storerooms for a siege, no stables, no kitchens worthy of the name. It does not guard a road, a port or a river crossing. It is a castle, quite literally, that defends nothing.

So what is it? Let’s step inside, and you will see why that question has kept people awake for centuries. Castel del Monte is a building obsessed with one number. The plan is an octagon. At each of its eight corners stands a tower, which is also an octagon. In the centre is a courtyard, once again an octagon. Each of the two floors is divided into eight rooms, sixteen in all, each shaped like a trapezoid, fitting together like slices of a perfect cake. Even some of the decorations repeat the theme. Walk around the building and the geometry is so rigorous that it feels less like architecture than like mathematics turned into stone.

Why eight? In medieval symbolism the octagon was the figure between the square, the earth, and the circle, the heavens: a bridge between the human and the divine. Frederick knew two famous octagonal buildings very well. One was the Palatine Chapel in Aachen, where Charlemagne lay buried and where Frederick himself was crowned King of Germany in 1215. The other was the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, which he saw with his own eyes in 1229, when he entered the city not with a battle but with a treaty, to the fury of the Pope. Many historians believe both are echoed in his crown of stone.

The materials tell another story of ambition. The main structure is in pale local limestone, but the great entrance portal, with its classical pediment that seems to anticipate the Renaissance by two centuries, is framed in coral breccia, a pinkish stone that glows warmly in the late afternoon. Inside, the rooms were once covered in marble and precious stone, with columns and ribbed vaults whose capitals mix Gothic leaves, classical motifs and faces carved by masters from Puglia, France and the Byzantine and Islamic worlds.

This is my favourite part of the visit, though: the plumbing. Several towers contain small rooms with latrines and washbasins, fed by cisterns that collected rainwater from the roof and channelled it through the walls. In a century when most of Europe’s nobility lived in smoke and mud, Frederick’s castle had something very close to running water. Somebody here cared a great deal about comfort.

Shadows, solstices and a Holy Grail

With so little written evidence, the theories have multiplied, and some of them are wonderful. For many scholars, Castel del Monte was a refined hunting lodge, perfect for an emperor who loved falcons more than almost anything else. For others it was a place of study and contemplation, a kind of temple of knowledge where Frederick could meet his philosophers and astronomers far from the noise of court.

Then the imagination takes over. There are those who measure the walls and find the golden ratio everywhere, those who swear that on the solstices and equinoxes the shadows of the walls fall on precise points of the courtyard, those who see the building as a giant stone calendar, and, inevitably, those who believe it was built to keep the Holy Grail. Umberto Eco’s readers like to recognise its silhouette in the octagonal library of The Name of the Rose, and the director Matteo Garrone chose it as one of the fairy-tale settings of his film Tale of Tales in 2015.

Take these theories the way you take a good legend: with pleasure, and a pinch of salt. The most convincing answer is perhaps the simplest. The German historian Carl Arnold Willemsen called Castel del Monte the “stone crown of Apulia”, and I think he was right. It was a statement, written in geometry, by a man who wanted everyone crossing the Murge to know who ruled this land, and how much he knew.

Prisoners, shepherds and twenty-five thousand lire

The castle’s later life was much less noble. After Frederick’s death, his son Manfred used it as a prison for a rebellious vassal. When Manfred himself was killed at the battle of Benevento in 1266 and the French Angevins took southern Italy, tradition says that his three young sons were locked up here for years, the last heirs of the emperor growing old in the building their grandfather had dreamed. Historians debate how long they really stayed, but the image is hard to forget.

In the following centuries the castle passed from family to family, among them the Colonna and, for a long time, the Carafa dukes of Andria. Then it was simply abandoned. For around three hundred years it sheltered shepherds, their flocks and the brigands who roamed the plateau. The marble that covered the walls was stripped and carried away, the furniture vanished, and wind and rain did the rest.

Its rescue came in 1876, when the young Italian State bought it for 25,000 lire, and restoration work began in the following decades. It even had a short military career: during the Second World War, the Allies installed a secret radio navigation station here, codenamed Big Fence, which helped lost and damaged aircraft find their way home. In 1996 UNESCO added Castel del Monte to the World Heritage List, praising its unique blend of classical, Islamic and northern European Gothic elements. And in 2002, when Italy chose the images for its euro coins, the smallest of them all went to Frederick’s crown.

Faithful Andria, and a treasure softer than stone

Castel del Monte stands in the countryside of Andria, inside the Alta Murgia National Park, about an hour’s drive from Bari. So, don’t leave without visiting the town. Frederick loved this town for its loyalty, and the words he is said to have dedicated to it, Andria fidelis nostris affixa medullis, “faithful Andria, fixed in our very marrow”, are still carved on one of its old gates. Two of his wives are buried in the crypt of its cathedral. And Andria has given the world another treasure, much softer than limestone: burrata, a pouch of fresh mozzarella filled with cream and shredded curd, born on the farms around the town in the early twentieth century. Eat it the same day, with bread and a little olive oil, and nothing else (read about it in Mozzarella, the pearl of Italian cuisine in our Blog). And, if you want to sleep in the same landscape, the old farmhouses of the Murge are waiting for you; I told their story in The masserie of Puglia.

Stand in the octagonal courtyard at the end of your visit and look up. The sky above you is cut into a perfect octagon, exactly as Frederick saw it almost eight hundred years ago. We will probably never know what he wanted to say with this building, and perhaps that is its real magic. Empires fell, prisoners came and went, shepherds lit their fires in the emperor’s rooms, and the crown is still there on its hill, quietly keeping its secret. And, every day, travelling in millions of pockets around the world.

Ciao da Marcello

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