The Castello Sforzesco is a complex of buildings in Vigevano that occupies the highest point of the city. It houses the Pinacoteca Casimiro Ottone, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale della Lomellina and the Pietro Bertolini International Footwear Museum.
What to see
Until the middle of the fifteenth century the area of the promontory was the site of the houses of the old village, with its first town hall and first churches. On the east side stood a square castle or «recetto», first of wood and then of brick, which between the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth became the residence of the Visconti: it is today's maschio, the keep. In 1341 Luchino Visconti had the lower fortress built, later called the rocca vecchia, and in 1347 the two strongholds were joined by the «strada coperta», a fortified building a hundred and sixty-four metres long. The Sforza, who took Vigevano after the siege of 1449, turned the keep into a ducal palace; with Ludovico il Moro, born in Vigevano itself, the transformation into a residence was completed, with a hanging garden enclosed by two porticoed buildings designed by Bramante, of which only the «loggia delle dame» remains. Traces of Bramante's painted decoration survive on the walls of Ludovico's stable.
The entrance tower, called the Bramante tower, is the civic tower and the symbol of the city; it was finished at the end of the fifteenth century, while in the seventeenth century the Baroque onion dome was added. In the nineteenth century the castle, used for military purposes, was much altered: in 1855, after the collapse of part of the central body of the keep, the engineer Inverardi rebuilt the collapsed part, with a Tudor-style façade on the courtyard side, and designed the Neo-Gothic entrance from corso della Repubblica. After a decade of abandonment, restoration began in 1980. The Museo Archeologico Nazionale della Lomellina was inaugurated in 1998 in the so-called third stable, while the Footwear Museum comes from the gift made to the Comune in 1948 by the industrialist Pietro Bertolini and has been since 2009 in the rooms above the second stable.
Visiting
The castle is in Vigevano, at the highest point of the city. The sources consulted give no opening hours or visiting arrangements for the complex and its three museums: check them.
Our editors' tip
In the belfry of the tower, not open to the public, is the seventeenth-century «campanone», deliberately cracked: it is said that in the nineteenth century its sound was so loud that it kept the inhabitants of the houses beside the castle and the square from sleeping, and they submitted a petition to the Comune; in the end a wedge was cut out of the bell to muffle its sound.
