Fénis Castle

Interesting facts

Its courtyard served as the model for the castle of Turin's Borgo Medievale, built for the 1884 Italian exhibition, which copies the curved stair, galleries and Saint George.

A short Old French poem scratched on a wall, dated 1402 and attributed to Boniface I, mourns his daughter Bona leaving home to marry, likening her to a little bird.

That 1402 poem counts among the oldest written examples of the French actually spoken in the Aosta Valley at the end of the Middle Ages.

A Latin inscription in the courtyard wishes the house to stand until an ant has drunk the sea and a slow tortoise has walked around the whole world.

Among the painted sages lining the galleries is a figure in Arab dress, perhaps a reminder that a member of the Challant family took part in a crusade.

The Saint George fresco bears the monogram BMS, read as the initials of its patron, Boniface, Marshal of Savoy.

In the chapel's fresco of the Virgin of Mercy, her cloak shelters the Pope, the Emperor and members of the Challant family, with Boniface I dressed in red.

Restorers found the outline of a kneeling knight in armour in the chapel's Crucifixion that was never painted in, a sign the work may have been finished in haste.

Sold in 1716 for 90,000 lire to pay family debts, the castle was bought by the Italian state in 1895 for just 15,000 lire.

The stone-slab roof slopes inward as well as outward, channelling rainwater down into the courtyard, where it was collected in a cistern.

Why it is worth it

Fénis Castle is the image most people have of a medieval castle: a ring of crenellated walls, a crown of towers of every shape, and a compact core rising on a low knoll in the middle of the Aosta Valley. Yet it was never really built for war. It stands on a gentle rise rather than a crag, and it was made as a showpiece residence for the Challant family, the viscounts of Aosta and one of the most powerful dynasties of the valley.

The castle is first recorded in 1242 as a Challant property, probably then a simple keep within a wall. Its present form is the work of the century between 1320 and 1420, under Aymon of Challant and his son Boniface I. Aymon gave the castle its pentagonal plan, the outer walls and many of its towers. From 1392 Boniface added the inner staircase, the wooden balconies and the prison, and engaged the Piedmontese painter Giacomo Jaquerio to decorate the chapel and the courtyard. Under Boniface the castle reached its greatest splendour, a lively court surrounded by a vegetable garden, a vineyard and pleasure gardens. The Challant held it until 1716, when debts forced its sale; it then sank into use as a farmhouse, stable and barn. In 1895 the architect Alfredo d'Andrade bought it and began consolidating the structure, and a second campaign in 1935 completed the restoration and furnished the rooms in period style. Today the castle belongs to the Aosta Valley region and is run as a museum.

The heart of the castle is its inner courtyard. A semicircular stone stair climbs to wooden galleries, and above it a fresco of Saint George slaying the dragon, painted around 1415 and attributed to Jaquerio's workshop, faces arriving visitors. The gallery walls are lined with painted sages and prophets holding scrolls inscribed with proverbs in Old French. The ground floor holds the armoury, kitchen and a cistern for rainwater; the lords' apartments and the chapel, frescoed by Jaquerio and his circle, are on the floor above. The nearby city of Aosta, the Roman Augusta Praetoria, is the capital of Italy's smallest region, ringed by high Alpine peaks.

Getting there

The castle is in the village of Fénis, about 13 km from Aosta. The nearest airport is Turin Airport (TRN), about 61 km away in a straight line.

Fénis Castle

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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