Borgo medievale di Erbusco con Castello

Erbusco's medieval plan groups a drawbridged gateway, a walled hilltop, a white Romanesque apse and patrician houses. The commune's history pages suggest that the castle may be the oldest in Franciacorta, possibly raised before the year 1000.

Why it matters

Erbusco preserves the most legible fortified borgo in the destination: castle, parish church and tower-houses stand in their original relationship on one hill, documented in the Brescian statutes of 1279. The complex remains part of the town centre: the public library occupies a former church, and the town hall is housed in a patrician palace.

What to notice

The southern drawbridge block has a great arch with a terracotta cordon. A fragment of a Roman funerary stele in Botticino marble is set into the wall at the corner of the vaulted passage; its abraded inscription retains the word SIBI. The south wall of the castle complex absorbs the former church of Santa Maria Addolorata, today the municipal library. On the north side, a small square contains the Pieve di Santa Maria Maggiore, rebuilt in Romanesque forms in the twelfth century with a thirteenth-century apse of squared marble, flanked by tower-houses and the massive Casa Ricci Curbastro. The castle's northern facade retains blocked windows and traces of early medieval geometric decoration beside the canonica door, recorded by the commune as evidence of the building's long history.

Context and history

The castle probably began as a refuge against Hungarian raids, raised either by the powerful Martinengo family or by the community itself, perhaps before the year 1000, and it certainly stood by the thirteenth century, when the Brescian statutes of 1279 named it. The Guelphs refortified it in 1312, and Azzone Visconti garrisoned it in 1326; Venice took the territory in 1426-27, lost the castle to Jacopo Piccinino in 1438, and regained it in 1440. French troops occupied it in 1509 and Landsknechts of Charles V in 1521, before Venice returned in 1529. A deep moat, about six metres, once ringed the walls and enclosed the borgo with its pieve; by 1609-10 Giovanni da Lezze described it as ruined with the ditches levelled, and the early eighteenth century brought partial rebuilding. The castle later sheltered borgo families as ordinary housing, and restorations begun in 1995 by the parish gave the complex its present, carefully conserved face.