Porta Angioina

Of the four gates that once pierced Campli's walls, one remains: the Porta Angioina, a thirteenth-century opening under a tall ogival arch, its crown set with three coats of arms of the Anjou kings. One of the few Angevin gates still intact in Abruzzo, it guards the Castelnuovo quarter and the memory of the borgo's fortified age.

Why it matters

Medieval Campli was enclosed and protected by high fortified walls with four gates, and the Porta Angioina is the only one left to show the borgo's medieval layout, according to the official municipal portal. The portal calls it one of the few gates of the Angevin era still intact anywhere in Abruzzo, which gives a small town gate more than local significance: it is a rare surviving piece of the military architecture of the Angevin kingdom that governed this coast of the Adriatic in the thirteenth century. The gate preserves the defensive logic of the borgo in its arch, merlons, machicolations and arrow slits.

What to notice

The gate's face is marked by an imposing ogival arch, above which sit three coats of arms of the French house of Anjou, the dynasty that gave the gate its name. Behind the crown, the defensive apparatus survives in merlons, caditoie — machicolations for dropping materials on attackers — and feritoie, the narrow arrow slits behind which sentinels, lookouts and archers once kept watch. When a siege threatened, the alarm was raised through the sound of the bell in the tower of the neighbouring church of San Giovanni Battista, built against the Castelnuovo quarter to strengthen its defence; in the fifteenth century that church's bell tower was in fact raised on top of the gate itself, a doubling of sacred and military architecture that is unusually easy to see here. The lane through the arch narrows and turns, a deliberate brake on an assault.

Context and history

The gate dates to the thirteenth century and answered to more than one name: the official page records Porta Orientale, and local documentation of the Castelnuovo quarter also calls it Porta di San Giovanni after the neighbouring church. Castelnuovo itself grew as a fortified settlement at the beginning of the fourteenth century inside Campli's wall circuit, and the gate formed its eastern lock. The bell tower superimposed on the gate in the second half of the fifteenth century is associated with the Lombard master Antonio da Lodi, whose terracotta hanging-arch crowns recur across the Teramo area, including the octagonal lantern of the cathedral's tower. As the walls were dismantled or absorbed into later building, three of the town's four gates disappeared; this one survived because the church and quarter it served stayed in continuous use.