When Hernando Petigno, general commander of the Royal Cavalry of Sicily and military governor of Syracuse, began work here in 1615, a stone watchtower already stood on the eastern spur of Monte Eknomo. Built between 1583 and 1585 to a design by the engineer Camillo Camilliani, on the orders of Viceroy Marcantonio Colonna, it would become the keep of a new fort. Around it rose Castel Sant'Angelo, one of the few Baroque fortresses raised in seventeenth-century Sicily, 130 metres above the sea, with the harbour to the south and the town to the north. The remains of the ancient Greek colony of Phintias lie all around.
What to see
The fort is roughly triangular. The solid mass of the old tower and the lower rooms wraps around a courtyard with an underground cistern at its centre. From outside, what strikes you is the compact bulk of the sloping scarp walls and the unbroken line of battlements; the walls, very thick and ringed with a cordon at the level of the merlons, join a powerful square keep that is half filled in solid. Guard turrets once rested on heavy corbels at the eastern, western and northern corners. Barracks, stables and warehouses ran along the entire inner perimeter. The only way in was from the south, across a drawbridge over a moat that cut off just the great tower from the countryside. At the far end of the courtyard, to the west, a chapel once opened beneath a wide arch; it is gone now, and only the outlines of its frames survive, which probably held a fresco or a painting.
Visiting
The fort never fired its guns in anger. Once decommissioned, it served as a telegraph station from 1849 to 1856, and later as a coastal signal station with a military air-force garrison. It was badly damaged during the Allied landings in Sicily on 10 July 1943, when it was shelled by the USS Brooklyn and the USS Buck; the ruined sections were afterwards repaired. The garrison stayed until 1965, when the fort was abandoned. Declared a historic monument on 8 July 1969, it was restored in the 1980s, and the inner atrium and the terraces can be walked again; there are plans to turn it into a museum.
Our editors' tip
Climb to the terraces: the view takes in the harbour to the south and the town to the north, and it becomes clear why the fort is the natural landmark for anyone exploring the archaeological area. It stands at the heart of the Hellenistic city that once spread across the top of Monte Sant'Angelo, so leave time for the ruins of Phintias that surround it.