Rocchetta Mattei

Crenellated towers, domes and horseshoe arches crowd together on a rocky spur above the Reno valley in the Bolognese Apennines, as if a medieval fortress and a Moorish palace had been fused into one. Rocchetta Mattei, the "little fortress" of Count Cesare Mattei, is one of the most remarkable pieces of 19th-century eclectic architecture in Italy, a building conceived less by an architect than by the imagination of its owner.

Mattei, born in Bologna in 1809, was a wealthy patron, one of the founders of the city's savings bank and a friend of figures such as Gioachino Rossini. After 1848 he withdrew from politics and devoted himself to a medical system of his own invention, electrohomeopathy. In 1850 he bought the hill where the ruins of the medieval Rocca di Savignano stood, a frontier stronghold destroyed by Bologna in 1293, and on 5 November that year laid the first stone. He moved in for good in 1859 and kept building for the rest of his life, receiving patients from Italy and abroad. Instead of a single designer, the work involved painters, craftsmen and local builders, among them the Bolognese scenographer Giulio Cesare Ferrari. After Mattei's death in 1896 his adopted heir Mario Venturoli added Liberty-style interiors.

The result is a labyrinth of stairs, terraces and courtyards. The Courtyard of the Lions repeats on a small scale its famous model in the Alhambra, with a four-lion fountain and walls lined with Seville tiles. The chapel borrows the striped interlacing arches of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, yet its rich "carved" ceiling is in fact painted canvas, and much of the apparent marble and wood throughout the castle is plaster, cement or papier-mâché, a deliberate theatre of illusion. Genuine treasures are set among the fakes: a tondo of the condottiero Niccolò Ludovisi attributed to Jacopo della Quercia, and 14th-century corbels by the Dalle Masegne brothers. Mattei's majolica tomb rests above the chapel altar. Since 2005 the castle has belonged to the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna, which restored it and opened it as a museum.

Getting there

The castle stands about 1 km above the village of Riola in the municipality of Grizzana Morandi, south-west of Bologna. Riola has a station on the Bologna–Pistoia (Porrettana) railway, and the SS 64 Porrettana road passes through the village. The town of Vignola lies about 29 km away in a straight line across the hills. Bologna Guglielmo Marconi Airport (BLQ) is about 39 km away.