What to see · Raccuja

More places of interest

• Castello Branciforti

  Inside this building there are, one on top of the other, a perhaps Roman well, a room that under Islamic rule may have been a bath, medieval cells turned into a judicial prison, a run of sixteenth-century arches and, on the first floor, the municipal library. It is a house-fortress that in two thousand years has never been empty.

  What to see

  The structure is rectangular, some fifty metres by twenty-odd, flanked by two cylindrical towers: of the southern tower only the foundations remain. You enter through a mannerist sandstone portal surmounted by the arms of the Branciforti Lanza, and climb to the upper floor by a single-flight staircase.

  On the ground floor, to the right of the entrance, great sandstone arches of the sixteenth century link the large rooms and create a run of arches that goes the length of the building. Upstairs is a wide hall with a sandstone-framed fireplace and a ceiling that takes up the old cannizzu vault, the Sicilian technique of cane and plaster. The castle dominates the upper part of the town and the Mastropotamo valley, and controlled the royal drove road that passed below.

  Visiting

  The castle is in the old centre of Raccuja, in the Nebrodi, in the province of Messina; it houses the municipal library, so you go in during service hours and for events. An hour.

  Our editors' tip

  Look for the rooms with the thickest walls: they are the medieval ones, and that is where centuries later they put the prison. Nobody builds a jail from scratch if the strongest room in the building is already available. Reuse does not follow aesthetics, it follows physics, and in a castle like this you can read it room by room.

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