The Guasco castle is the medieval castle of Francavilla Bisio, an imposing fortified block of brick with projecting battlements and two corbelled turrets, one square and one round. Crenellated curtain walls, a moat and a drawbridge complete the complex, decorated with the sawtooth ornamental bands that are the signature of Po-valley brick Gothic. The oldest core is a tower of the tenth century, around which the castle was rebuilt and enlarged in the fourteenth, when its border position between the Republic of Genoa, Savoyard Piedmont and Lombardy made it matter.
What to see
The building is a book of stratigraphy: centuries of rebuilding and raising can be read in the differences of style between the various additions, from the fourteenth-century works to the changes the Guasco family imposed in the nineteenth on the square tower and the central body. Beside the main block stands a lesser construction with flush merlons, and the moat and walls run all around.
Visiting
The first explicit mention of the castle is from 1375, in a bull with which pope Gregory XI, then in Avignon, granted its ownership to Luchesio Spinola. The Spinola held it for three centuries, not without blood: in 1455 Oberto Spinola was killed by the men of Gavi in the tower, and in the seventeenth century trial records tell of an internal prison, the "Fornetto", where political enemies and inconvenient figures ended up. In 1681 emperor Leopold I passed the fief to the Grillo family, and in 1780 came the Guasco, who gave the castle its present name and shape. Occupied by German troops in the Second World War and then abandoned, it was restored and partly reopened to the public in 2005; today it belongs to the Giriodi Panissera di Monastero family.
Our editors' tip
From outside, the most instructive game is to follow the bricks: the sawtooth bands, the crenellations, the two hanging turrets and the differences in masonry let you date the castle's seasons by eye, from the early-medieval tower to the nineteenth-century romanticisms. It is the rare case of a manor that shows its own restoration like an identity card.