In the nineteenth century the marchese Amati remodelled an existing building for his wife, a duchess of the Caetani di Sermoneta family, and out of it came the palace that still closes piazza Parlamento, in the lower part of Castelnuovo Magra. The state room keeps the fresco cycles painted in the early nineteenth century by the painter Bontemps, and under the floors lie cellars far older than the palace itself, dug in the sixteenth century.
What to see
Those sixteenth-century cellars are the part anyone can see: since 1996 they have housed the public wine library of Liguria and Lunigiana, the tasting counter for the wines of the two valleys, and you go down to them straight from the palace. On the main floor the state room keeps the frescoes by Bontemps; outside, the eighteenth-century hanging garden survives, older therefore than the remodelling the marchese ordered.
The building also holds the municipal historical archive, with deeds and documents going back to the sixteenth century, and for years it was the town hall. You will find it named sometimes simply as palazzo Amati, sometimes with all three surnames, Amati, Ingolotti and Cornelio.
Visiting
Piazza Parlamento sits in the lower part of the village, where via Vittorio Veneto meets the Sottoportici, and the palace is the building that stands out there. For visitors the way in is the wine library in the cellars, so the opening hours are its own and not those of a museum. Anyone walking here passes in front of it anyway: the Via Francigena, the pilgrim route from Canterbury to Santa Maria di Leuca, runs through Castelnuovo. The village sits on monte Bastione and from the upper streets, on clear days, you can pick out Gorgona, Capraia and the outline of Corsica.
Our editors' tip
We treat the palace as the way into the village rather than a stop on its own: out of the cellars, we walk up via Vittorio Veneto to piazza Querciola, below the castle, which owes its name to the oak planted in the middle of it. That castle, once the bishops' palace, is where on 6 October 1306 Dante Alighieri, acting for the marquis Franceschino Malaspina, signed the peace of Castelnuovo with the bishop of Luni. The parish church of Santa Maria Maddalena, on the same climb, holds a Crucifixion by Pieter Brueghel the Younger with four crosses on Calvary: ask before you go, because the painting has been moved to another site for the time being.