On Trinity Sunday 1449 Caterina di Challant and her husband Pietro Sarriod d'Introd came out of the castle, walked down to the village square and danced with the young people of the town. They were in the middle of an inheritance war against her male cousins, who invoked Salic law; that dance won her the town's support, and the historic carnival of Verrès has remembered it every year since.
What to see
From outside it is an austere cube thirty metres on each side, almost without decoration: one of the first single-block castles in the Aosta Valley, a single building instead of the usual cluster of structures inside a wall. Ibleto di Challant had it rebuilt from scratch after the Savoy granted him the fief in 1372; a Latin inscription on the architrave of the first door, as you climb from the ground floor, records that the work ended in 1390. The castle sits on a rocky promontory above the town and the road into the Val d'Ayas, facing the castle of Issogne across the Dora.
Visiting
Caterina's story ended badly: in 1456, after her husband was killed in an ambush, she had to surrender, and the fief passed to her cousin Giacomo di Challant Aymavilles. The castle remains one of the most visited in the region, and the military fortress can still be read whole, without the softening that elsewhere erased the original purpose.
Our editors' tip
If you can choose your date, come for the carnival: it is the one moment when the castle and the town tell the same story. Otherwise look at it from the valley floor before going up, to take in how sharp that cube is on its promontory.
