Castellero

Castellero takes its name from a castle levelled to the ground. In 1312 the Solaro, backed by the Provençals of Ugo del Balzo, seneschal of Robert of Anjou, beat the De Castello here and pulled down the fortress held by the Ghibelline Pulsavino, an anti-Guelph stronghold in the civil wars of the Middle Ages. A new fortress rose on the ruins and took the name of the demolished one, castellero or castellaro, a word sometimes used for a ruined castle.

From that period survive the moat, now almost gone, and the anchor-shaped hooks in the round vault of a tall room at the tower's base, where lamps hung. Work of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, largely attributed to the Ponte family, made the fortress a country house, leaving the tower as war's only trace: rhomboid, thirty metres high, roofed with sloping tiles until collapse risk in the early twentieth century had the roof removed and ten rectangular merlons set there; in 1961 these were recut as swallowtails. The arms show a red castle with Guelph merlons and, on silver, a red saltire crossed by the motto En esperance in gold capitals.