Castello delle Pietre
Capua (CE)
Hidden gemCastles
The story
The Norman keep of 1062 is made out of the Anfiteatro Campano: limestone blocks torn from the gladiators' tiers and reassembled into a fortress. Capua devoured itself in order to survive.
Access
Visible free from outside; interiors not open
More gems in Capua
- History & archaeology
Museo Campano (Matres Matutae)
Capua (CE)
In Capua the Museo Campano lines up the Matres Matutae, dozens of tufo mothers seated with children in their laps: fertility deities worshipped here in ancient Capua.
Sacred artAbbazia di Sant'Angelo in Formis
Capua (CE)
On the slopes of Monte Tifata, above an ancient temple of Diana, the basilica preserves cycles of medieval frescoes that cover the walls like a painted story.
- Sacred art
Chiesa di San Michele a Corte e cripta longobarda
Capua (CE)
Palatine chapel of the Lombard princes, 10th century: you enter beneath a triple window of palm-leaf capitals and go down into a crypt that turns around a single squat column, where frescoes that resurfaced only in 1876 still survive.
More gems: Castles
- Castles
Palazzo Sansevero
P.za San Domenico Maggiore
On the corner of piazza San Domenico the palace of the princes of Sangro still carries the echo of the night when Gesualdo surprised and killed Maria d'Avalos and her lover.
CastlesCastel Capuano
zona Garibaldi
An old Norman castle that for four centuries served as the courthouse of Naples: here justice held session in frescoed halls, in the shadow of nearby Porta Capuana.
CastlesPalazzo Donn'Anna
Posillipo
The unfinished seventeenth-century palace juts sheer over the water, dark and labyrinthine: through its empty rooms legend has the shadow of Donn'Anna still wandering.
CastlesCasina Vanvitelliana
Lago Fusaro, Bacoli
An octagonal pavilion that seems to float on Lago Fusaro, a Bourbon hunting lodge reached by a little bridge, among reflections and morning mists.
CastlesVilla Lysis (Fersen)
Capri
Built in 1905 by the poet Fersen and dedicated to love and to sorrow, an Art Nouveau villa among the pines, with a Latin inscription at the entrance and the opium room hidden below.
CastlesPalazzo d'Avalos (ex carcere)
Terra Murata
First the palace of the d'Avalos family, then a prison until the late twentieth century: the empty cells command Terra Murata, suspended between the memory of the inmates and the silence that lives there now.