Malgrà is a castle that gave up being a fortress early and went on being a house. The feudal lord Martino di San Martino had it built between 1333 and 1336, down on the plain rather than on a height, with two separate blocks held together by a curtain wall and a round tower that still stands. It stayed with the counts of San Martino until the middle of the seventeenth century, then changed hands several times, and at almost every handover it grew.
What to see
The two-arched portico belongs to the century after the building went up, and the frescoes with religious subjects on the walls of the halls date from the same period. What you see today, though, is also the result of a nineteenth-century worksite: in 1884 Alfredo d'Andrade began a substantial restoration, concentrated above all on the western wing, and the work was carried through in 1926 by Carlo Nigra. These are the two names that remade the Middle Ages in Piedmont in their own fashion — d'Andrade is the man behind the Borgo Medievale in Turin, born in that very year — and Malgrà carries their mark as much as that of the San Martino: bare brick, battlements, the tower brought back to what it was believed to have been.
Visiting
The castle belongs to the town council, which bought it in 1982 and turned it into a venue for exhibitions, concerts and meetings. Since 1993 the Associazione Amici del Castello Malgrà has looked after openings and guided tours together with the council, from May to October. Around it lies the park, named after the local partisan Dante Meaglia, awarded the silver medal for military valour; the playground instead carries the name Antico Gallo, from the town's coat of arms. At the end of July, during the feast of Saint James, smiths work live on a sculpture in the courtyard.
Our editors' tip
Look in the greenery for the trace of the tunnel. The Rivarolo-Castellamonte railway ran beneath the castle and its park, opened in 1887 and in service until 1986: so as not to touch house or garden, it was sent through a short tunnel. It is the detail that tells the relationship between town and castle better than any battlement, because it says that when the railway arrived Malgrà was already something not to be spoiled.