Italy · 13th century
Cly is a castle in the Italian municipality of Saint-Denis, in Aosta Valley, northwest Italy. It belongs to the so-called primitive style of castle, consisting of a keep with a surrounding wall. The ruins rise from a bed of metamorphic rock, on the edge of a fault line which extends to the Quart Castle.
Cly was first mentioned in a document from 1207, in which the "chapel sancti Mauricij (Saint Maurice) de castro Cliuo" is mentioned among the goods of the Vicarage of Saint-Gilles in Verrès, but the keep has been dated to 1027 using an analysis of the tree rings in its timbers (dendrochronology). Originally a fief held from the Counts of Savoy, in 1376 the direct ownership passed to the Duchy of Savoy, which installed a castellan to administer it for them until abandoned in 1550. The castle fell to ruins in the centuries that followed.
Eventually the castle ruins became the property of the nearby town of Saint-Denis. The castle is visible atop the hill overlooking Chambave.
Text adapted from “Cly Castle” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Cly Castle ranks #4,920 of 9,035 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #356 of the 555 mapped in Italy. Founded 1207, it is older than 74% of the atlas's dated landmarks, one of 1090 atlas entries founded in the 13th century. Wikidata records about 1,346 visitors in 2022. 10 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. The nearest day-trip guide is Turin, 75 km away. It is one of the 16 landmarks on the atlas's regional map of the Aosta Valley. It is stop 8 of 18 on the Aosta Valley castle route, Aosta to Ivrea. See how Italy compares in the castle statistics.
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