The castle of Carini is a medieval fortress, built by the first Norman feudal lord, Rodolfo Bonello, a warrior in the following of Count Roger I of Sicily. In 1283 it passed to the Abate family, who began to turn it into a residence; having sided with the Chiaramonte in the struggle for the crown, the Abate were declared felons and lost all their property. In 1397 King Martin I entrusted the land of Carini to Ubertino La Grua, who in 1402 married his only daughter, Ilaria, to the Catalan Gilberto Talamanca: so began the house of La Grua Talamanca, which held the barony until 1812. From the mid-fifteenth century, under Baron Giovan Vincenzo, a continuous series of building works turned the barracks into a palace for summer residence.
What to see
The medieval walls are of the eleventh and twelfth centuries; Arab-Norman elements can be recognised in the second gate, with its pointed arch. On the doorways are shields with a crane, alluding to the La Grua. On the ground floor a large hall is divided by two pointed arches with a column in the centre; on the east side are a washing trough of Billiemi stone and a chapel frescoed in trompe-l'œil, with a wooden tabernacle of the early seventeenth century and a marble statue of the Madonna of Trapani.
On the upper floor, at the entrance to the fifteenth-century wing, a marble doorway bears between two phoenixes the words «Et nova sint omnia», continuing those of another doorway, «Recedant vetera»: they were probably put up when the castle, under the direction of the architect Matteo Carnalivari, turned from barracks into a noble residence. The banqueting hall has a coffered wooden ceiling with stalactite elements, decorated with coats of arms, psalms to the Madonna and mottoes, and a fireplace with the La Grua arms. Other rooms are frescoed, like the one with Penelope and Ulysses.
Visiting
Opening times and tickets should be checked with the town of Carini or on the town's tourism portal.
Our editors' tip
The castle is famous for a crime. On 4 December 1563 Laura Lanza di Trabia, baroness of Carini, wife of Vincenzo La Grua Talamanca, was killed by her father for reasons of honour together with her supposed lover, Ludovico Vernagallo; the death records of the two are transcribed in the archive of the mother church. The story was reconstructed in the mid-nineteenth century by Salvatore Salomone Marino from the «cunti» of the storytellers, and a legend has it that on the anniversary the bloodstained print of the baroness's hand appears on a wall.
