Castello di Capua

On a tufa hill over the Tappino valley, Gambatesa's castle keeps an unusually intact mannerist fresco cycle, painted in 1550 by Donato Decumbertino for the Di Capua family and ranked by the Ecomuseo del Fortore among the most complete in the sixteenth-century Kingdom of Naples.

Why it matters

Most castles in Molise kept their military faces; this one was deliberately undressed. When the Di Capua family took over the fief in 1484, they tore down much of the severe medieval stonework and rebuilt the manor as a signorial palace, and in 1550 Vincenzo Di Capua commissioned Donato Decumbertino — Donato da Copertino, a follower of Giorgio Vasari who had worked with him in Rome — to cover its state rooms with frescoes. The result, on the official page of the Direzione regionale Musei Molise, is described as leafing through a book of Mannerist art in the countryside of a small Molise town. The Salone delle Virtù and its companion rooms preserve this transformation from fortress to signorial palace.

What to notice

• The painter's signature, hidden in plain sight: a spider's web illusion beside a parrot, into which Decumbertino wove the inscription ending "nell'anno del cinquanta" — his own declaration that he painted this in the year 1550.
• The sequence of frescoed rooms named on the museum page: the Salone delle Virtù, the Sala delle Maschere, the Sala del Pergolato, the Sala del Cammino and the small Studiolo, with mythological and biblical episodes, ancient worthies, landscapes and allegories all celebrating the virtues of the Di Capua.
• The emblems to hunt for: a turtle, symbol of modesty and prudence, near the ruins of the Sala del Canneto; the owl of Minerva; the parrot that stands for eloquence.
• The later picture collections — Praitano, Eliseo and Musa — hung in the large upper rooms, spanning painting from the modern age to the contemporary.
• The building's double nature from the outside: a quadrangular, three-storey block that the regional tourism portal already reads as a gentiluomo's palace rather than a fortress, facing the square at the top of the borgo.

Context and history

The museum's account begins in the thirteenth century, when Riccardo da Pietravalle became lord of a place whose name — so the story goes — came from a physical defect of his own; the folk etymology is presented as such by the museum itself. What is documentary is the logic of the site: control of the transhumance routes between Puglia and Abruzzo made the fortunes of the families who held Gambatesa in succession, and the castle is their monument. The fief passed through other hands before the Capua family became owners in 1484 and began the transformation into a noble residence; the regional portal records the later feudal succession down to the Ceva Grimaldi family. The Ecomuseo del Fortore situates the manor on the colle Serrone, at the heart of the historic centre, and counts the 1550 fresco cycle among the most important and complete decorations produced for the Kingdom of Naples in the Cinquecento.