The Visconti castle stands at the edge of Cherasco, where the wedge of plateau the town sits on looks down on the meeting of the Stura di Demonte and the Tanaro. A stronghold probably stood here already, reinforced by the medieval commune in the thirteenth century; then Cherasco passed to the house of Savoy, and in 1348 Luchino Visconti, Lord of Milan, defeated them, took the town and ordered a new castle.
What to see
That castle was built entirely of brick, quadrangular in plan, with a tower at each corner and a smaller tower carrying a drawbridge at the entrance: an arrangement that recurs across the Visconti dominions. Cherasco counted for enough to appear twice as a dowry in dynastic marriages, in 1368 for the wedding of Violante Visconti to Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence, and in 1387 for that of Valentina Visconti to Louis I, Duke of Orléans.
Visiting
The castle is privately owned and can only be seen from outside, which matters less here than usual: much of what you see is a rebuilding. After the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559 it returned to the Savoy, who took refuge in it from the plague in 1630 and from the French in 1706; in 1691 Victor Amadeus II decided to concentrate the defence of his lands in a few strongholds, and Cherasco was not among them, so the castle was deliberately blown up in part so that it could no longer serve as a fortification. Reduced to a half-ruin, it was a barracks until 1815 and a farmhouse after that.
Our editors' tip
At the beginning of the twentieth century new owners filled out the walls with extensive insertions, raised the towers and redesigned the interiors, turning the place into a residence with an Italian garden. Look at it knowing that: the outline against the confluence is largely an early twentieth-century idea of a castle, mounted on whatever the mines of 1691 had left standing.