Under the portico of this Aosta valley castle is the closest thing to a photograph the fifteenth century has left us: a row of lunettes painted with the shops of the time. The baker with bread on his counters, the greengrocer, the butcher with quarters hanging, the tailor cutting cloth, the apothecary with his jars in a row, the guardroom with soldiers playing. They are not sacred scenes or allegories: they are trades, prices and the faces of ordinary people, painted around the year fifteen hundred for the prior Georges de Challant, who turned a fortress into a residence.
What to see
At the centre of the courtyard is the pomegranate fountain: a wrought-iron tree rising from an octagonal basin, with metal fruit among the leaves. It is the castle's emblem and resembles nothing else in the Alps. Around it, the rooms keep their coffered ceilings, stone fireplaces, frescoes with heraldic motifs and furniture put back in place.
On the portico walls, below and around the lunettes, are the graffiti left by visitors over five centuries: names, dates, phrases, insults, cut into the plaster by those who passed through. It is a second layer of document, involuntary and continuous, and in places it is denser than the painting. The castle was bought and restored in the nineteenth century by a painter, who then gave it to the state in 1907.
Visiting
Issogne is in the lower Aosta valley, not far from the motorway exit and from the castle of Verrès, which stands on the mountain opposite and can be seen from here; you go in only on a guided visit at fixed times, with a single or combined ticket and closures on certain days and in certain periods. An hour.
Our editors' tip
Ask the guide to leave you a few minutes in front of the apothecary's lunette, and look at the labels on the jars: they are written, and they can be read. Then lower your eyes to the graffiti on the wall beneath the paintings and look for the oldest dates. On a single wall you have the daily life of the fifteenth century and five centuries of people who came to see it.