Location: Catania Map
Constructed: middle 13th century
Ursino Castle or Castello Ursino is a medieval stronghold situated in Catania in Sicily Island in the Southern Italy. The citadel was constructed between 1239 and 1250 upon orders of Emperor Frederick II, king of Sicily. Ursino Castle was a key to keep a royal presence in the region. Many other private castles of the local feudal lords were demolished to keep the crown happy. Today Ursino Castle or Castello Ursino is open to the public. It houses a Catania Civico Museum and a gallery of Sicilian art.
History
On the site where the current building
stands, there is evidence of one of the oldest nuclei of the town of
Catania, dating back to the first residential phase of the Greek
polis of Katane. Although in the past it was hypothesized here the
presence of a Norman tower - the Tower of Don Lorenzo - not only
does no trace remain of it, but scholars tend to believe the
hypothesis of a Norman pre-existence on the site of the Ursino
castle without of scientific foundations and tend to look for it in
another site in the historic city center. On the origins of the
building, although there is no direct evidence that associates it
with Frederick II, scholars tend to identify it with the castrum
mentioned in the letter addressed to its architect, Riccardo da
Lentini, whose construction had yet to start in 1239.
Federician age
The Ursino castle was probably commissioned by
Frederick II of Swabia and built not before 1239. The emperor had
probably thought of the castle as part of a more complex coastal
defensive system in eastern Sicily (among others also the Maniace
castle of Syracuse and that of Augusta can be traced back to the
same project) and as a symbol of Swabian imperial authority and
power in a city often hostile and rebellious to Frederick. The
project and the direction of the works were entrusted to the
military architect Riccardo da Lentini. According to Correnti, it
was built on the seashore by the will of Frederick II and the name
"Ursino" given to the castle derives from Castrum Sinus or the
"castle of the gulf". However, originally the castle was not
supposed to be on the seashore at all, as demonstrated by the 16th
and 17th century plans and the same name Ursino would be linked to
the castle family of the same name that would have occupied it
during the 13th century.
Sicilian Vespers
Some of the most
important moments of the Vespers war took place inside the castle.
In 1295 the Sicilian Parliament met, which declared James II decayed
and elected Frederick III as king of Sicily. During 1296 the castle
was taken by Robert of Anjou and subsequently conquered again by the
Aragonese. King Federico lived in the manor from 1296, making it the
Aragonese court and so did the successors Pietro, Ludovico, Federico
IV and Maria. In addition, in 1337 the Parlament Hall was also the
funeral chamber for the body of King Federico III. In 1347 the
so-called Peace of Catania was signed inside the castle between
Giovanni di Randazzo and Giovanna d'Angiò.
The royal seat
castle
The Ursino castle was the royal residence of the kings of
the Aragona family of Sicily (parallel Sicilian branch of the
Barcelona family) and hosted all the kings from Frederick III and
all his descendants until 1415 it hosted the Queen Bianca d'Evreux
of Norman but hereditary origin of the kingdom of Navarre, wife of
Martin I of Sicily (who died in 1409). Even in the early fifteenth
century the building is surrounded by the city and several huts are
set against it. It will be King Martin I of Sicily in 1405 to have
the space around the manor cleared to create a military square,
demolishing among others the convent of San Domenico, located there
since 1313.
During the age of the Viceroys
The castle,
home of Maria di Sicilia, was the scene of the kidnapping of the
queen by Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada on the night of 23 January 1392,
to avoid the marriage with Gian Galeazzo Visconti. With the advent
of Martin I of Sicily, the castle once again became the court of the
kingdom.
Alfonso the Magnanimous gathered the barons and
prelates of the island on 25 May 1416, in the hall of the
Parliaments of the castle for the oath of loyalty to the Sovereign
and until 30 August the last acts of political life took place that
saw Catania as the capital city of the kingdom. In 1434 the same
king Alfonso signed the deed in the castle granting the foundation
of the University of Catania.
In 1460 the first Parliament of
the Aragonese-Castilian period will meet in the Ursino castle,
chaired by the viceroy Giovanni Lopes Ximenes de Urrea. In addition,
don Ferdinando de Acuña viceroy of Sicily died inside in 1494. He
will be buried in the Cathedral, in the chapel of Sant'Agata.
Fortress and prisons
From the 16th century, with the
introduction of gunpowder, the castle saw its military role
increasingly weakened, becoming temporarily the residence of the
viceroy, and more constantly of the castellan, while a part of it
was used as a prison.
It is due to this period, in particular under the
regency of Charles V, a massive manipulation of the building aimed
at obtaining a fortress integrated with the civic defensive system:
the Bastion of San Giorgio was built to defend the castle on the
south side and the Bastion of Santa Croce towards the north-east,
while some changes in the Renaissance style are carried out inside.
It was later also equipped with a drawbridge.
On 11 March
1669 from a fracture above Nicolosi began the most impressive
eruption of Etna in historical times, which after having destroyed
gardens and farmhouses, reached the city walls, which it managed to
overcome from the North-West, in the area of the Monastery of San
Nicolò l'Arena, to then head towards the same Bastion of San
Giorgio. On April 16 the lava arrived around the castle and while
not affecting its structures, it filled the moat, covered the
ramparts and moved the coastline for a few hundred meters. Some time
later the earthquake of 1693 also caused a series of damage to the
structures, definitively compromising the military role of the
castle.
Restructured, it continued to host the first
Piedmontese (1714) and then Bourbon military garrisons, also taking
the name of Forte Ferdinandeo. However, it remained a prison until
1838, when the Bourbon government, recognizing its role as a
fortress, restored it and added new factories that ended up hiding
more and more the original Swabian structure.
In this state
the manor remained until the 1930s, when it was subject to a radical
restoration, in view of its transformation into a museum.
Civic Museum
Acquired in 1932 by the municipality and subjected
to restoration, today the castle is located in the historic center
and, since 20 October 1934, it has been used as a civic museum of
Catania. The restoration works were completed in November 2009.
Architecture
The building has a square plan, each side
measuring about 50 meters. The four corners are equipped with
circular towers with a diameter of just over 10 meters and a maximum
height of 30, while the two surviving median towers (originally
there were four) have a diameter of about 7 meters. The walls are
made of opus incertum of lava stones and have a thickness of 2.50
meters. Originally the castle presented at the base of the
escarpments that slender it giving it a decidedly imposing
appearance. They are visible in the moat on the south side of the
castle thanks to the latest excavations carried out. The original
project probably did not include a battlements, which is rare in
Frederick's castles. But subsequent modifications and
reconstructions of the top part of some towers probably involved the
insertion of battlements. The original plan is based on the
relationship between square and octagon, with possible reference to
the cabala.
Over the centuries the original structure has
changed considerably. In fact, originally it assumed an appearance
similar to the various Frederick structures formally inspired by the
Umayyadi castles, being a short distance from the main access road
to the south of the city - the Porta della Tima located in the
broken wall area - and, surrounded by ruins of ancient memory ( from
Bolano onwards, Naumachia was identified to the west and the
Gymnasium to the east), it integrated with the southern districts of
the city which were located close to the building until the early
15th century. In fact, from 1405 it was initially equipped with a
square of arms, to be fortified in the following century with the
addition of a ditch and surrounded by the city wall, along which two
bulwarks (San Giorgio and Santa Croce ). On the northern side -
which is the main one and is well preserved with four windows
although not originally planned to make it less vulnerable to enemy
attacks - was the main entrance to the castle, defended by a
drawbridge and defensive walls whose remains are still visible in
the moat in front of the entrance. A shoe base was built to
strengthen the castle structure.
The south side has changed a lot over time, due to
the disappearance of the median tower and the numerous windows open
over time. Here we find a secondary door called the "false door"
which, by means of a slide (which was probably made of wood and
stone), led to the landing stage beyond the bastion. The
sixteenth-century manipulations and the lava flow of 1669
unfortunately do not allow us to establish whether urban walls were
foreseen that separated the manor from the nearby beach: the south
side of the castle in fact until the mid-sixteenth century must have
been located near a large sandy shore, overlooking even at a
considerable distance on the Ionian Sea. The construction of the
bastion of San Giorgio and the platform of Santa Croce made the
building efficient for the use of cannons, fortifying the castle and
making it part of a much more complex defensive system than in the
Middle Ages. The definitive removal from the sea and the raising of
the level of the land surrounding the castle was due to the lava
flow of 1669 which surrounded it almost completely and submerged the
ramparts.
Even the east side no longer has the central
semi-tower, but there is a marvelous Renaissance window with a
pentalpha in black lava stone. Up to now, the modern restoration
works have brought to light part of the sixteenth-century bastions,
a perfectly preserved sentry box and the original shoe bases that
today restore the original majesty to the corner towers of the
castle.
The entrance, simple, is located in the north
elevation and has a sculpture above in a niche depicting a Swabian
eagle, symbol of the power of the sovereign Frederick II, who grabs
a hare mistakenly mistaken for a lamb. As can be seen from the
sixteenth and seventeenth-century plans, this entrance was hidden by
a semi-cylindrical tower open on the western side with a bayonet of
which today only the foundation wall remains.
The courtyard
developed inside and there remains a beautiful courtyard with an
external staircase in Gothic style built in the Renaissance period.
Around the internal courtyard there were four large rooms flanked by
smaller rooms, which lead to the corner towers. Each large room is
divided by three bays, covered by ribbed cross vaults that branch
off from semi-columns with capitals adorned with leaves, this flight
of square cruises gives the appearance of "bays of a majestic Gothic
temple".
From the lower floor to the upper floor it was
accessed through the spiral staircases positioned inside the north
and south semi-towers. Functionally it combined both the function of
palace (palatium) and that of manor (castrum).
The overall
appearance of the castle in its surrounding environment has changed
considerably over time, it was close to the sea on the south and
east sides, probably in a large open area reduced to agricultural
use after the progressive abandonment of the southern districts
during late antiquity. Later, perhaps along the course of the
fourteenth century during the expansion of the Giudecca of Catania,
the countryside on which it stood was occupied by buildings and
convents, including that of San Domenico, erected in 1313. Since
1405 the city that by now suffocated it it was gutted and a large
parade ground was created around the building. Later the structure
was surrounded by ramparts and equipped with a moat and was made
imposing by the escarpments.
After the lava flow of 1669 and
the earthquake of 1693, the castle saw the coastline move away by
hundreds of meters and the ground level rise by about ten meters so
that its grandeur and magnificence were hidden forever.
The
graffiti of the prisoners
The long period during which the castle
was used as a prison led to significant structural changes, since
the Frederick manor, despite its size, did not have a sufficient
number of rooms that lent themselves to be used as a prison. Thus
the large rooms on the ground floor were divided by new walls and
attics, which created smaller rooms in which the prisoners were like
the damned souls in the so-called dammusi, that is, small cells,
dark and infested with mice, scorpions and tarantulas.
A
trace of this page in the history of the castle can be found in the
hundreds of graffiti that fill the walls and door and window jambs
of all the rooms on the ground floor (except those on the north
side) and also the inner courtyard.
Drawings: these are coats of arms, but also heads
and faces generally drawn from the front, sometimes with a
caricature intent. Among the figurative representations, those of
greatest interest are found in the courtyard. It is a crenellated
tower and four three-masted boats, types of galleons in vogue
between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, described with great
precision. Symbols of a religious nature are also very frequent, in
particular the Cross and the instruments of the Passion, in the
representation of which the prisoner approximated his suffering to
that of Christ. The most interesting example is found in the
courtyard, a large cross with Solomon's Knots at the top, with the
ladder, the sponge, the pincers and the hammer.
Inscriptions:
often it is just a name, a date (the oldest is 1526) and the phrase
Vinni carceratu. But the repertoire is vast and includes references
to the guilt attributed to the prisoner, with respect to which he
declares himself innocent, victim of conspiracies or betrayals, and
then sentences or reflections dictated by the harshness of life in
prison. Among these is a certain Don Rocco Gangemi, who writes:
Miseru cui troppu ama e troppu cridi. Particularly interesting, on
the portal of the south side of the courtyard, are two long
sentences that show precise and punctual references to the
contemporary production of the poets Antonio Veneziano and Antonio
Maura, and a lapidary engraving on the meaning of life: Mundus rota
est. The language of these inscriptions is mostly Sicilian, but with
the use of Latin, Spanish and a mixture of Sicilian and Latin.