In 1799 baron Giovanni di Giura served his sentence on the ground floor of the tower of his own house, which had long doubled as a prison: the plaque recording it is set into the façade, put there by the nineteenth-century restoration. The Palazzo baronale Di Giura, the family's residence in Chiaromonte, came into being that way, leaning against the eastern side of the town's medieval fortified circuit and taking in one of its round towers.
What to see
The tower is the most recognisable part: battlements were added at the top and a series of two-light windows along the shaft, but its entrance was never opened onto the street. You reach it only from inside the palace, because the original defensive function was deliberately kept; inside, a wooden spiral staircase climbs to the summit, and from up there the whole Sinni valley is in view. Until a few years ago the so-called Chinese room held the house library and a collection of Chinese objects that had belonged to a Di Giura who served as a mandarin at the imperial court.
The rest of the building is made of the metamorphic rock blocks known here as puddinga, the easiest material to come by in this territory, and it rises over three levels: the ground floor opens onto the street, while the first and second have their own entrances from the garden. The garden is itself a piece of fortification, obtained by walling in the ground right behind the medieval defences; the slope was dealt with by terraces planted with evergreens, cypresses, firs, cedars and pines. Among the trees four more towers still stand, two square and two round, from the Sanseverino phase.
Visiting
The palace takes up the east side of the old town, and its street front is the ground floor: the baron's plaque can be read from outside, without going in. The other two levels face the garden instead, and it is from there that the layout makes sense, because palace and walls are one and the same thing. If you can get into the tower, go up: the spiral stair leads to the highest point of the eastern slope.
Our editors' tip
Do not stop at the town. Out in contrada Battifarano, beyond the built-up area, stands a second building tied to the same family: the torre di Giura, better known around here as Torre Albineta. Seeing it after the palace makes plain how far the Di Giura control over this land reached, inside the walls and outside them.