On 29 January 1240, writing from Gubbio, Frederick II ordered Riccardo da Montefuscolo, justiciar of Capitanata, to gather materials for a castle near Santa Maria del Monte. That single line produced the most argued-over building of the Italian Middle Ages: an octagonal plan, eight octagonal towers at the corners, 539 metres above sea level on a hill of the Murge plateau, and neither moat nor drawbridge. When the emperor died in 1250 it was almost certainly unfinished. For centuries it was called the Castle of Santa Maria del Monte; the present name first appears in an Aragonese decree of 1463. A World Heritage Site since 1996, it passes through Italian hands every day unnoticed: it is stamped on the 1 cent euro coin.
What to see
The octagon is everywhere: the perimeter, each tower, the courtyard. The outer side measures 10.30 metres, the courtyard is 17.86 across, the towers reach almost 23 metres. Each of the two floors holds eight trapezoidal rooms under cross vaults, with a different keystone in every room; the ribs carry no load, they only draw. Three towers contain spiral staircases that climb anticlockwise: 44 steps, each cut from a single block around a central column as thin as an arm.
The main portal faces east, towards the equinox sunrise, with two fluted columns and a pointed pediment quoting antiquity; the double pincer stair in front of it was rebuilt in 1928. Inside there is almost nothing, which is the most instructive part: marbles, furnishings and the slender window columns were stripped in the eighteenth century, and Vanvitelli planned to reuse those columns for a fountain in the park of the palace at Caserta. What remain are the windows, with a single three-light one on the side facing Andria, the stone benches along the walls and the shaft where the portcullis chains once ran. Five towers held cisterns, the other three housed falconers and soldiers.
Visiting
The castle stands in open country, 17 kilometres from Andria: you come by car or on the seasonal buses, leave the vehicle at the foot of the hill and cover the last stretch on foot or by shuttle when it runs. Tickets at the entrance; the interior takes a little under an hour, because the rooms are empty and there is no museum route: what you look at is stone and geometry. Go up to the upper floor, where the vaults are more slender and the windows larger, and stop in the courtyard to look up. There is no shade on the plateau: in summer bring water and a hat.
Our editors' tip
We go in the late afternoon, once the coaches have left and the low light brings out the limestone. And we ignore the esoteric pamphlets about the Templars: the historian Raffaele Licinio spent years dismantling them, and the castle has nothing to do with the order. Counting is better: the faces of the octagon, the different keystones room by room, the steps of the spiral. One genuine curiosity instead: in the nineteen-fifties a bacterium, Streptomyces peucetius, was isolated from the soil around the castle, and from it came daunorubicin and then doxorubicin, chemotherapy drugs still in use.
