Under the wooden lintel of the main door the pulleys are still in place: they carried the chains that raised the drawbridge, which together with the tower was the only protection of the entrance. Above it, a projecting cornice bears the carved date of the 1521 restoration. Everyone in Ripalimosani calls the building the Castello, even though its structure is that of a noble palace, and the confusion describes it well: a fortified house that changed job without changing shape.
What to see
Its origins go back to around the year 1000. The turning point came with Marino Mastrogiudice, lord of Ripalimosani from 1516, who five years later ordered a major restoration and turned the old castle into a palace. From then on every change of ownership came with a notarial inventory, and those papers describe a building altered again and again that nevertheless kept its features: the elongated plan, the central courtyard, the hanging garden, the tower. You enter through a wide courtyard onto which the workshops of the court artisans once opened. On the piano nobile, facing south, a large hall served as a theatre, its walls decorated with images of the kings of Naples, and beside it a chapel whose wall altar is still in place.
Visiting
What stays with you is the least noble part. The palace had a prison cut into the tuff, known locally as the “cafurdio”: no light at all, an iron chain fixed to the wall to hold the prisoners still. Today the piano nobile is a reception hall and weddings come here from the whole district, which is worth a question to the staff before planning a visit. There is one more reason to connect the building with the mother church: until 1807 the marquises' palace kept the Ripalimosani copy of the Shroud, a full-size reproduction regarded as a relic by contact, until the last marquis, Nicola Mormile, entrusted it to the collegiate church of the village, where it is venerated to this day.