One tower is all that survives of the Angevin castle of Atella. The earthquake of 1694 wrecked much of the town and was hardest on the castle: the whole fortification came down, with its four flanking guard towers, and the only part left standing was the block that people in Atella still call the Torre Angioina. The castle was born with the town, and the town did not grow slowly: Atella was founded from scratch between 1320 and 1330 on a chessboard plan, at the will of John of Anjou, son of King Charles II, count of Gravina and lord of San Fele, Vitalba and Armaterra, who promised ten years free of taxes to anyone moving to the new settlement. Plenty of people came, from Rionero, Monticchio, Lagopesole, Balvano, Sant'Andrea; the town got walls, two gates and this castle.
What to see
The surviving tower is the only piece of the castle you can still look at; the rest has to be reconstructed from the few recorded facts. A deep moat ran all the way round, and the towers were there to keep watch: a working piece of military engineering, not a country lord's residence. Under the Angevins, Atella was one of the wealthiest towns in Basilicata and exported grain, cheese and cured meats to the larger cities of the south; the castle was there to defend that wealth.
It was needed often. It went through two long and bloody sieges, in 1361 and in 1496, and the second ended with the town sacked by the French army of Gilbert of Montpensier. Six years later, in 1502, the Aragonese commander Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba took Atella after some thirty days of siege. In 1423 the town had passed as a fief to Giovanni Caracciolo, and after him it kept changing hands: Philibert of Chalon in 1530, Antonio de Leyva in 1532, then the Capua, the Gesualdo and the Filomarino families.
Visiting
You look at the tower from below, inside the grid of streets the fourteenth-century plan left intact: after the tower, that chessboard layout is the most Angevin thing left in Atella. Of the town's two gates only one survives, the San Michele gate; it is worth hunting down, because it is the other surviving piece of the defences.
Our editors' tip
Look at the town's coat of arms, on documents and on the blue and yellow gonfalon: a golden lioness holds a cannonball raised in her right paw. It is not decoration, it is the memory of the siege of 1502, the one the castle failed to hold off.