The castle at Tufara does not stand outside the village: it occupies the tufa rise in the middle of the old centre, and anyone who reaches the square meets it face to face, with the church of Santi Pietro e Paolo answering it from the far side.
What to see
The original core is Longobard, quadrangular in plan and rather small, built to keep watch over the surrounding country. From outside the medieval features still read clearly: towers breaking the curtain wall, a battlemented walkway along the top, loopholes at floor level and a large entrance door. The irregular outline, which people here compare to a bean, came from the enlargement ordered in the sixteenth century by Decio Crispano, when the fortress stopped being only that and turned into a nobleman's residence.
The roll of owners shows what the position was worth. In 1299 Guglielmo di Marzano, lord of the castle under the Angevins, made it over to his wife Isabella di Gesualdo as security for her dowry, together with the hamlet of Monterotaro in the Capitanata. Once the Marzano died out the counts of Gambatesa held the fief until 1465, when it passed to the crown and at once to Giovanni della Candida, by the will of Ferrante I. Then came the Crispano, the Caracciolo, the Carafa — Antonio Carafa paid thirty-one thousand ducats for it — and finally the Pignatelli, who kept it until 1806.
Visiting
Do not expect furnishings or splendour: in the nineteenth century the castle was abandoned and stripped, and restoration has given back the walls, not the rooms the Crispano lived in. You look at it mostly from outside and from below, the mass that closes the square and the rock it rests on.
Our editors' tip
Come up to the square on 17 January: when the parish bell strikes noon, the Tufara carnival opens at the foot of the walls, with a donkey dressed in rags, the improvised mocking verses called maitunate, and the mask of the Devil, wearing seven goatskins stitched onto him.