Castello di Casertavecchia

At the highest point of Casertavecchia stand the ruins of a stronghold documented in 861, when the Lombard chronicler Erchemperto recorded the village of Casahirta. Reinforced by the Normans with square towers and rebuilt under the Swabians, the castle served Lombard counts, Norman lords and, later, the Aragonese.

Why it matters

The castle is the reason Casertavecchia exists where it does. The municipal history reads the village's own name from the Lombard chronicler Erchemperto, who documented the settlement of Casahirta in 861, and states that a castle stood here with certainty by that date; from 879 it housed the count Pandolfo of Capua. For the next six hundred years the fortress was the seat of power on the Tifatini ridge — held in turn by Lombards, Normans, Swabians and Aragonese, as the heritage literature summarises — before politics moved downhill and left it to rust quietly into ruin. The surviving enceinte includes remnants of six square Norman towers in rubble masonry and the enormous circular keep of the Swabian rebuilding. Together they represent distinct building phases.

What to notice

The curtain wall includes fragments of six square Norman towers in rubble-faced masonry; a rectangular tower may also date to the Norman period. On the eastern side, two halls and traces of thirteenth-century mullioned windows mark the former residential quarters. A heritage account records a moat around the complex. The southern curtain retains remains of bath facilities. The cylindrical keep belongs to the Swabian phase and rises above the earlier walls.

Context and history

The fortress's story tracks the political history of Campania in miniature. Lombard counts of Capua held it from the ninth century, and its documented existence by 861 makes it one of the early castles of the Capuan orbit. The Norman conquest that began in 1062 brought the first great reinforcement programme: a keep and the six square towers whose rubble stumps define the ruin today. The decisive transformation, however, came under the Swabians, when the complex was entirely rebuilt and the circular keep was raised — the municipal history connects the work with the di Lauro family, and in particular with Riccardo, son of Tommaso di Lauro, who married Violante, daughter of Emperor Frederick II, in 1246. The Aragonese succession of 1442 began the long decline recorded by the comune, as the centre of gravity shifted toward the plain. Two centuries of quiet later, the borgo's identity as a feudal seat was formally ended when the bishopric moved to the new city in 1842.