Castello di Faicchio
Faicchio (BN)
Hidden gemCastles
The story
On a rocky spur above the Titerno valley, the ducal castle of Faicchio watches over the village with its Norman towers reworked through the centuries.
More gems in Faicchio
- Sacred art
Grotta di San Michele (Faicchio)
Faicchio (BN)
On Monte Monaco di Gioia a natural cavity preserves the Lombard cult of the archangel, with frescoes of Byzantine flavour faded by damp and a silence that tastes of rock.
History & archaeologyMonte Acero e la cinta megalitica sannitica
Faicchio (BN)
Three kilometres of polygonal blocks, dry-laid and interlocked, have ringed the summit for twenty-six centuries, and no one up there will ask you for a ticket: from the Samnite arx the gaze plunges over the whole Valle Telesina.
- History & archaeology
Ponte Fabio Massimo (Ponte del Diavolo)
Faicchio (BN)
The bridge that legend has Fabius Maximus the Delayer cross as he chased Hannibal, and that the locals call the Devil's Bridge: below, the Titerno carves a dark gorge; the polygonal-work foundations are older than Rome.
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.