Above Stilo, on the summit of Monte Consolino, the Normans built a fortress commanding the whole valley and the Ionian sea. The first mention is of 1093, in a grant from count Roger to Bruno of Cologne, the man who shortly afterwards would found the charterhouse not far away. The castle watched the point where Calabria narrows between its two seas.
What to see
The curtains and the towers remain: the outer ones triangular in plan, those round the fortified core circular and pierced with arrow slits; one still bears the name of the Norman house. At the centre stood a chapel with a main altar and four more set against the walls, and beneath the floor the cistern that held the water.
In the thirteenth century it was one of seventeen Calabrian castles administered directly by the Angevin crown, and it also served as a prison. A seventeenth-century chronicler calls it so strong as to make the town below impregnable, and recalls that barons and feudatories were obliged to pay for its repairs: a castle kept up at the expense of a whole province.
Visiting
The castle stands above the village of Stilo, reached by a steep mule track of about half an hour or by a dirt road; the site is open and free, with no facilities, so proper shoes and water are needed. An hour and a half including the climb.
Our editors' tip
Look for the terracotta pipes and the cistern under the central building: up there is no spring, and the whole system served to collect rain from the roofs. A fortress on a bare ridge lives or dies by water, and this is the plant that let it hold out a siege. It is the least showy part and the most important.