Of the castle that Ferrante Sanseverino, prince of Salerno, had built at Rotondella in the early sixteenth century, one piece is still standing: the tower. People here still call it Torre del Carcere, the prison tower, because that is what it was for centuries, and the name has lasted better than the walls around it. It is the building the present-day town starts from: the urban core took shape in those years, while the name of the place is older and turns up in 1261 as Rotunda Maris, most likely for its position facing the Ionian Sea, 576 metres up.
What to see
The tower is the only part of the sixteenth-century fortification to have come down intact: not a ruin put back together, but the original structure, left standing once everything else had gone. In the same years Sanseverino also had the Palazzo Baronale built, and it is to that double building programme that the street plan the town still keeps goes back. At the end of the same century Rotondella was raided by the Ottomans, who took a large number of prisoners of war.
There are no cells inside any more. The tower houses the municipal library and the historical archive, so the building that once locked people up now keeps the town's paperwork: two opposite jobs under the same roof, a few centuries apart.
Visiting
You get in during library hours, since the library shares the rooms with the archive: the tower is not a museum and has no visitor route, what you see is a building in use. It stands in the old centre, the same one the murals run through and from which the Balcone dello Jonio viewpoint opens, the spot where you can follow the coast of the Gulf of Taranto from Puglia to Calabria. In those same lanes, beneath the palazzo of the Bitonte family, are the Lamie, seventeenth-century vaulted stone arches.
Our editors' tip
Walk up and ask at the library about the historical archive: Rotondella's records are consulted inside the very house that served as the prison, which is the most direct way to gauge how much the town has written about itself. Then look for the Palazzo Baronale: same patron as the tower, and the two buildings tell the same story about power.