Castel Savello stands on an isolated rise, Monte Savello, at the foot of the town of Albano Laziale. It was the stronghold of the Savelli, feudal lords of these places, with a view over the whole coastal plain and, behind it, the Alban Hills. The family had owned the estate since the twelfth century and built the castle in the thirteenth, in the time of the popes Honorius III and Honorius IV. In 1435 it was razed to the ground by the troops of Cardinal Vitelleschi, commander of the forces of Pope Eugene IV, and was never rebuilt.
What to see
Substantial ruins remain. In the eighteenth century an attempt was made to establish a new settlement on them. In 1963 Giorgio Schanzer began to bring together into a single property the many plots into which the top of the hill was divided, and with the help of donkeys to carry materials work began to stop the collapses and clear the area around the ruins.
From the hill come some pieces in Albano's civic museum: a votive offering of two pottery vases, a brooch, glass-paste necklace beads and two bronze basins, and the head of a Latin warrior in polychrome terracotta, attributed to the decoration of a temple.
Visiting
The ruins are privately owned: access should be checked before setting out.
Our editors' tip
During the Second World War, in 1944, the height was used by German troops as an observation post to direct the fire of the heavy guns against the Allies who had landed at Anzio: it exploited the same view over the coastal plain that the Savelli stronghold had.
