At a glance it looks like a farm, and in part it is: but the pointed portal on the east side, the tower at the corner and the arms of the Piquart de la Tour carved over the entrance, dated 1627, tell another story. The Povil court is a fortified medieval complex, far less known than the theatrical castle of Quart in the same comune.
What to see
The complex stands at 693 metres along the road from Villair to Cleyves and is made of medieval houses pushed against one another. The tower, on the east side, has three floors above ground, a fine arched door and some worked windows; the main dwelling faces the inner courtyard with two Gothic windows in tuff. On the outer east front a fifteenth-century Annunciation survives in poor condition. Bruno Orlandoni notes that this type of house with courtyard and tower, which combined defence, dwelling and trade, spread widely in the fifteenth century: parallels turn up in the Lostan house in Aosta and in the fortified houses of Arnad, Verrayes and Châtillon.
Visiting
The court is private and cannot be visited: you look at it from the road. The original core was a tower of the lords of Quart, extinct in the second half of the fourteenth century; the Savoy enfeoffed it to Jean-Michel Piquart, castellan of Quart, and his descendants built it up in stages into what stands today. When the Piquart de La Tour died out in turn, everything passed in 1680 to the baron of Quart, Carlo Filippo Perrone.
Our editors' tip
It is worth the detour for one good reason: here you see how a fortified house was actually lived in, without the theatre of the castles. One appealing hypothesis places the site a Roman mile from the milestone of Saint-Eusèbe on the via delle Gallie, five miles out of Aosta.