Palazzo Orsini (Reggia Orsini)

Begun in 1461 for Count Orso Orsini and arranged around a vaulted courtyard with a piperno staircase, this Renaissance palace has been a count's residence, a Jesuit house, a barracks and, since 1994, Nola's courthouse. Its marble facing, one humanist recorded, came from the Roman amphitheatre.

Why it matters

Few southern Italian Renaissance palaces have kept a single, legible biography the way this one has. A long Latin inscription in capital letters, run beneath the cornice under a single string course, records the building's date and patron: construction from 1461 for Orso Orsini, Count of Nola, of the powerful Roman house that ruled the city. The Trecento and Quattrocento counts of Nola governed one of Campania's most ancient towns, and the palace they raised on the main square was designed to say so — a sober quadrilateral of three storeys over an arcaded courtyard, its catalan-derived portal carved with a refinement that later centuries never quite equalled. Since 1994 the building has served as the seat of the Tribunale di Nola, the Procura della Repubblica and the local bar association.

What to notice

The palace stands beside the church in Piazza Giordano Bruno. Together with the sixteenth-century Chiesa del Gesù, built for the Jesuits from 1568 to about 1584 under the architects Giovanni Tristano and then Giovanni De Rosis, the palace closes the southern front of the square; the church's lower facade is deliberately faced in travertine recovered from the palazzo, so the two buildings converse in each other's stone. The palace has a finely sculpted entrance portal of Catalan derivation, the wide courtyard with its vaulted atrium, the cross vaults, the archivaulted entrance hall, three orders of windows beneath the one cornice, and the staircase whose steps are cut from piperno, the grey Neapolitan tuff that signals money and rank in this region's buildings. The palace was originally faced in tufo; the humanist Ambrogio Leone wrote in his De Nola Patria, printed in Venice in 1514, that its marble slabs had come from the city's Roman amphitheatre — spolia as family statement.

Context and history

The Orsini chapter ended in the mid-sixteenth century. The Jesuits, whom the Comune's records bring to Nola from May 1558 thanks to Countess Maria Sanseverino, wife of the last count Enrico Orsini, received the palace itself in 1559 and held it until the suppression of their order in the Kingdom of Naples in 1767. The state then turned the building to military use, first as a cavalry headquarters and, from 1860, as the seat of the Distretto Militare, until that was dissolved in the late twentieth century. Judicial conversion began in 1994, and the adaptation works doubled as an excavation: Roman structures in brick, dated to the second century AD, came to light about half a metre below the floors — evidence that the Renaissance builders had set their courtyard directly over the Roman city. The palace appeared in FAI's I Luoghi del Cuore census.