Castello Svevo

Raised by Frederick II in 1227 beside the inner harbour, the Swabian Castle has served emperors, viceroys, prisoners and the Italian Navy.

Why it matters

This is the fortress of the Hohenstaufen Mediterranean. Willed by Frederick II in 1227, according to the account kept by the municipal administration, it preserves the trapezoidal plan of the federiciana foundation and commands the western side of Brindisi's inner port — the "Castle of the Land" to the sea-castle's counterpart on the water. Its career runs through the whole political history of southern Italy: Angevin completion, Aragonese rebuilding with an antemurale and four great angle towers, sixteenth-century adaptations to gunpowder, a Murat-era prison, and then the Italian Navy, which took it over in the early twentieth century and fought two world wars from it. When Brindisi became the seat of an embattled Italian government between 10 September 1943 and 14 February 1944, the command functions coordinated by King Vittorio Emanuele III operated from this castle.

What to notice

The castle's layers include a trapezoidal Swabian core, an Aragonese antemurale with four corner towers, a vaulted-over moat and a later ditch added when firearms changed defensive design in the sixteenth century. Its complex included the Ponte, Torretta della Ferrata, Piazza d'Arme, Sala Imperiale, Sala Museale and Dongione.

Context and history

The Angevin era completed the fortress begun by Frederick II, and Ferdinando I of Aragon then redefined it comprehensively, building the antemurale and the four large towers and roofing over the old moat. From 1814, under Gioacchino Murat, the castle became a bagno penale, a prison function that continued under the Bourbons and Savoys into the early twentieth century. The Navy purchased it in those years for its Brindisi base, ran its main operations from here during the First World War, and kept it at the centre of the port's war effort in the second, including the months when the kingdom's government sat in Brindisi.