Rocca Manfrediana

Brisighella announces itself with three chalk-white crests, and the Rocca Manfrediana commands the middle one. Behind its walls, two distinct towers and a museum of local gesso culture tell seven centuries of border warfare between Faenza, Venice and the papacy.

Why it matters

Whoever held this spur held the Lamone valley. The fortress crowns one of the three selenite pinnacles on which Brisighella was laid out, flanked by the Torre dell'Orologio and the Santuario del Monticino. Its curtain walls enclose the ridge. The complex includes a museum devoted to the history of gypsum and a collection of medieval material in the Venetian tower.

What to notice

The entrance stair cut through the rock at the porta delle Gabelle reflects the defensive use of the local gypsum. The older Manfredi tower has a spiral staircase linking three rooms and a fourth-floor circular chamber around a central pillar, roofed in wood and brick. The Torre Veneziana is a round keep added during Venetian rule; its cistern, spiral stair and upper gallery form part of the structure. A domed chamber beside the gallery, probably a powder magazine, connects with drawbridges between the two towers. Along the walls, a late-sixteenth-century wooden roof covers the perimeter walkway, and embrasures in a bombardier gallery were designed for flanking fire.

Context and history

Francesco Manfredi, lord of Faenza, raised the fortress in 1310 over the remains of an earlier castle destroyed by a Ghibelline faction, and his family kept Brisighella through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, apart from the interval of Cardinal Albornoz's campaign for the papacy between 1368 and 1376. Galeazzo Manfredi modernised the defences in 1394; Astorgio II reinforced them again between 1457 and 1466. In 1494 the fortress withstood a siege by the Duke of Urbino thanks to the resistance organised by Dionisio di Naldo, whose family chapel survives in the town's church of San Francesco. Cesare Borgia took the rocca in 1500, and in 1503 it passed to the Republic of Venice — the episode that gave the round keep its name, since the Venetians enlarged the smaller tower into the massive cylindrical keep. Papal troops recovered it in 1509; a grant to Alfonso II d'Este from 1560 lasted only five years; and thereafter, briefly interrupted under Napoleon, the fortress served the Church State until 1860.