Castellaccio di Lentini

On a flat-topped limestone spur south of Lentini stand the wall footings and buried halls of the Castellaccio, the medieval fortress also known as Castrum Vetus. Documented from the Norman age and rebuilt in the thirteenth century under Frederick II, it guarded the city of ancient Leontinoi, and its ruins still read as a manual of military engineering.

Why it matters

Few sites in eastern Sicily show so clearly how a fortress and a landscape were cut to reinforce each other. The Castellaccio occupies a rocky outcrop with a level summit at the centre of a fortified system: the hill of Tirone rises to the northwest, Lastrichello to the southeast, and deep moats separate the stronghold from both heights. To the north the rock falls sheer towards the Valle del Crocifisso, to the south towards the Valle di San Mauro, so that human work only had to complete what geology had begun.

The site's documentary pedigree is exceptional for a ruin. The municipality, which owns the monument, notes that the earliest significant information dates to the Norman era, when the chronicler Ugo Falcando recorded the devastation of the settlement by the 1169 earthquake. Under Frederick II the fortress was rebuilt, and a famous epistle addressed to Riccardo da Lentini describes walls renewed with squared limestone blocks and three new towers, one of them probably the keep.

What to notice

Walk the perimeter first. Remains of the curtain wall follow the edge of the summit plateau, and on the south side a massive work of squared blocks in twenty surviving courses ends at the moat in a sharp angle: this is the so-called arx triangularis, a triangular tower recorded by the historian Fazello, whose lower portion is all that survived the violent earthquake of 1542. On the blocks that are less weathered you can make out incised stonecutters' marks, the same lapicidi signs observed at Castel Maniace in Syracuse and at Castello Ursino in Catania, a signature of Swabian building sites.

Two features below ground reward attention. A rock-cut hall measuring about 16.72 by 5.58 metres is reached by a barrel-vaulted staircase of twenty-two steps and is divided into five bays by semipilasters under a vault with pointed arches; an inscription of 1579 is carved on its east wall. Near it are cisterns, and on the northwestern side a stretch of wall with a recess probably cut for defensive purposes. One of the two rock isthmi that link the outcrop to the neighbouring hills bears a transverse cut of almost six metres into which a drawbridge once slotted. A possible apse, four metres across, at the cliff edge may belong to a chapel, though some scholars read it as the core of a lost wall facing.

Context and history

The fortress stood on ground fortified long before the Middle Ages: Greek founders of Leontinoi cut two great fossati across the spur, and scholars connect the site with the Bricinna of Thucydides. Rebuilt in the first half of the thirteenth century, the castle was assigned works described in the letters sent from Lodi in 1239 to Riccardo da Lentini, prefect of the new buildings, whose enterprise is dated between 1223 and 1239; in 1233 Frederick II convoked the Sicilian parliament at Lentini. Muslim rebels had been relegated to the castra of Lentini and Syracuse in 1223, and the fortress also served as a prison and as a hunting residence beside the nearby Castellum Novum.

Its later life was turbulent. During the Sicilian Vespers the Angevin governor Papirio Comitini was killed inside in 1282, and Peter of Aragon appointed Riccardo Passaneto castellan. The fourteenth century brought sieges in the feud between the Ventimiglia and Chiaramonte families, with Blasco Alagona taking the stronghold. In 1414 Queen Bianca of Navarra staffed it with a castellan, vice-castellan, porter, twelve servants and a chaplain; in 1434 Alfonso of Aragon granted it to Vincenzo Gargallo. The 1542 earthquake brought down the triangular tower, the great earthquake of 1693 ruined the complex, yet a document of 1735 still records a garrison drawing gunpowder. The Catania Superintendency undertook the first modern restoration of the underground chamber in 1986. An old painting of the Madonna, the Madonna del Castellò, is said to have been carried to safety from here during a French attack in 1675; it is now venerated in the Chiesa Madre.