Laurenzana castle sits on top of the crag and watches the Camastra valley: that was exactly its job, to be a lookout post. The outline you see today was built in 1150 by the feudatories of the Norman lord Guglielmo, on top of a Lombard fortress; but the rock had been fortified before that by the Byzantines, and had also served as an Arab outpost. Part of it was later handed over so that Basilian monks could make a hermitage of it. From the middle of the thirteenth century the castle passed to the Swabians, then the Angevins, then the Aragonese, and after 1454 it became the feudal property of a succession of families.
What to see
Today it is a ruin, but a legible one. From 1483 the lord of Laurenzana, Raimondo Orsini del Balzo, rebuilt it as a baronial residence: he enlarged the site and had the ramp built that climbs to the main portal, and that ramp is still the way in. The work continued in 1606 under the Gaetani d'Aragona, and the castle then stayed with the Dukes of Belgioioso until the early nineteenth century.
The towers, on the other hand, are gone. After the earthquake of 16 December 1857 they were pulled down along with the other unsafe buildings, and a clock that almost certainly hung up there was recovered from the rubble. The Angevin wall that once closed the town with round scarped towers has vanished as a ring too: from the seventeenth century those towers were absorbed into the built fabric and reused as houses.
Visiting
You walk up from the centre, along the ridge lined with the old middle-class palazzi; Laurenzana stands at 850 metres and the crag is the highest point of the town. The right route is the one the town has always had between its two poles: the mother church of the Assumption below, the castle at the top. Look at the access ramp first, then turn to face the valley: that is the reason the castle is where it is.
Our editors' tip
Look for the coat of arms with three mounts topped by a six-rayed star. The Loffredo family introduced it after the Orsini del Balzo, and it replaced the earlier town emblem, which showed Saint Lawrence with his gridiron. It is the quickest way to understand how things worked up here: the saint who gives the town its name was pushed aside by one family's heraldry.