The town's coat of arms shows three towers on a green hill: they are the castle's. It once had three circular towers, and today not one of them stands whole. The ruins sit at 1023 m, on the summit of the larger of the two rocky spurs between which Viggiano is spread, the highest point of the built-up area. The fortress is certainly earlier than 1239, the year the village appears as a castled settlement in the Regestum, the list of Frederick II's feudal lords; it was reworked in the Angevin period, when the fief went to Bernardo della Baume, justiciar of Basilicata and knight of Charles I of Anjou. Under the Normans it had belonged to Guglielmo de Tiville and, from 1167, to Berengario de Giso, already lord of Sarconi and Perticara.
What to see
What brought the castle down was the earthquake of 1857, the same one that destroyed almost the whole village. Of the entire structure, some stretches of wall and substantial parts of the corner towers have survived: enough to follow the perimeter and to see how little room there was up there. In the fourteenth century the fief had passed to Giovanni Pipino, then to Roberto Sanseverino and from 1467 to the Dentice family, forced in 1630 to sell it to Giovanni Battista Sangro, who in 1638 obtained the title of prince of Viggiano.
Set into the east wall is a marble symbolising Mithras, the god of a cult far older than the castle: the least predictable piece in the whole ruin.
Visiting
The ruins can be visited freely: no ticket office, no opening hours. You walk up from the old centre through lanes linked by steps and passageways that follow the shape of the hill; at the foot of the castle runs the San Benedetto street, with the church of the same name built in 1561. Look at the corner towers first, the most readable part of what is left.
Our editors' tip
On the way up, keep an eye on the doorways of the houses and on the keystones of the arches: small harps are carved there, dated between 1858 and 1882, the signature of the families of musicians who left Viggiano for the world; the stone comes from the bank of the Alli torrent. At the top you are at the highest point of the village, at 1023 m, and it is the right place to understand how Viggiano rebuilt itself after 1857 while keeping its earlier street plan.