Castello Svevo

The Castello di Augusta or Castello Svevo is a castle in the Sicilian town of Augusta in the Free Municipal Consortium of Syracuse. Like the rest of the historic old town, the castle lies on an island in front of the modern town of Augusta, reachable by a bridge.

The castle in its present form was built in 1232 by order of Emperor Frederick II on the foundations of an older fortification. The construction was directed by the Praepositus Aedificiorum Riccardo da Lentini.

The castle has a roughly square ground plan (with a rectangular inner courtyard). The outer walls are each about 60 m long. At each corner stands a quadrangular tower. In the middle of the southern wall front (next to the main entrance) stands a pentagonal tower; on the west and east sides the towers in the middle of the outer wall are of rectangular ground plan. Excavations by the local monuments authority have shown that the pentagonal tower was originally octagonal, thus recalling the octagonality of Castel del Monte. Likewise this tower form suggests a connection with the octagonal outer towers of Frederick's castle of Cosenza in Calabria. Architectural-historical details allow the interior design to be derived from Cistercian forms, specifically from those of Clairvaux abbey, which was important for the southern filiation ("box ribs" etc.).

Generally the building form was modelled (as often in the architecture of Frederick II's circle) on the form of a Roman castrum. Over time the castle was frequently rebuilt and in the process greatly altered, above all inside. It served military and civil purposes (customs warehouse). In the period of Spanish rule in southern Italy (the ruling house of Bourbon-Sicily) the second wall around the castle was erected.

From 1890 to 1979 a prison was housed in the castle. After a long period of vacancy and decay it was restored in the 1990s.

Machine-translated from “Castello di Augusta” on the German Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Castello Svevo ranks #5,844 of 7,044 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #389 of the 416 mapped in Italy. Founded 1232, it is older than 74% of the atlas's dated landmarks — one of 781 atlas entries founded in the 13th century. See how Italy compares in the castle statistics.

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Read the full history on Wikipedia (in German) ↗