Castel del Monte

Seen from the surrounding countryside of northern Apulia, Castel del Monte looks less like a fortress than a stone crown set on a hilltop 540 metres up. Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, had it built in the 1240s; a document of 1240 already orders work on it. What makes it unlike any other castle is its geometry. The building is a perfect octagon with an octagonal tower at each of its eight corners, eight rooms on each of its two floors, and an eight-sided courtyard at the centre. The walls are about 25 metres high and the whole structure is 56 metres across.

Why Frederick wanted an octagon is still argued over. It may echo the Dome of the Rock, which he saw on crusade, or Charlemagne's octagonal chapel at Aachen; some read it as a figure halfway between the square of the earth and the circle of the sky. There is no moat and no drawbridge, and it was once dismissed as a hunting lodge, although archaeologists now think it had a curtain wall and served as a citadel. The main door, facing east, is framed like a classical temple front, with fluted pilasters and a pediment — a sign of the emperor's taste for antiquity. Theories linking the castle to the Templars have been firmly rejected by historians.

Inside, the rooms are bare. Under the Angevins the castle became a state prison, holding Frederick's grandsons after 1266; later it was abandoned, and in the 18th century its marble columns, wall facings and window frames were stripped, some of them for the Bourbon palace at Caserta. What remains is the architecture itself: vaulted rooms, staircases inside three of the towers, and a few carved heads and capitals. The Italian state bought the ruin in 1876 and began restoring it in 1928.

The castle appears on the Italian one-cent euro coin and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996. Umberto Eco's fortress-library in The Name of the Rose is widely thought to have drawn on it. The surrounding hills are the Castel del Monte wine area, and in the 1950s soil samples taken near the castle yielded the bacterium from which the anticancer drug daunorubicin was developed.

Getting there

The castle stands in open countryside in the municipality of Andria, about 16 km from the town. The nearest airport is Bari Karol Wojtyła (BRI), about 42 km away. Private cars cannot drive up to the castle: visitors park in a car park roughly 2 km below the summit and take a shuttle bus or walk the rest of the way.