In 1630 the feudal lord of Ruoti had a palace built on the small square of the village and, to fit it all in, took the church as well. The chapel of San Sebastiano, which had stood there for a long time, was joined to the new building that same year: it had been withdrawn from worship, and the lord obtained permission to build on top of it. That is where the name palazzo del Principe comes from, the one the people of Ruoti still use.
What to see
The title is not decoration. Ruoti changed hands more than once, from the Sanseverino to the counts of Muro and then to the Orsini di Gravina, before passing to the Capece Minutolo, who took the title of prince in the first half of the seventeenth century: they are the lords of the Terra di Ruoti in the years when the palace takes shape. The village sits on a height above the course of the fiumara of Avigliano, and the old centre has tightened around that square.
Of the chapel that was swallowed up, what remains is mostly what came afterwards: it became the seat of the National Guard and, more recently, a shop. The name has not been lost, though, because the alley running alongside still carries that of the saint. In the surrounding streets you can pick out the stone doorways of the old houses of Ruoti, the work of the stonecutters who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also signed the altars of the village churches.
Visiting
The palace is a building of the inhabited centre, not a museum, and it is looked at from outside: from the little square it faces and from the alley named after San Sebastiano, the only sign left above ground of the chapel shut inside its walls. Come on foot, because the streets of the old nucleus are narrow and steep, and give yourself time to read the doorways you pass along the way.
Our editors' tip
Follow the same family out of the village: in contrada Spinosa the feudal lord had the church of San Rocco built on his own land during the plague of 1651, and the front of its portal in Abetina stone carries the stylised coat of arms of the Capece Minutolo. On 16 August the statue of the patron saint arrives there in procession, and leaves again on the first Sunday of September.
