Rocca di Campiglia

On the highest hill of Campiglia Marittima, the excavated remains of a medieval fortress form an archaeological park with a museum in the cassero. Crenellated walls, an ancient cistern and the cassero now hold the story of the Della Gherardesca counts, Pisan and Florentine garrisons, and the borgo that grew beneath them.

Why it matters

The Rocca di Campiglia occupies the summit above the hill town. Long before the painted lanes and craft shops of the lower borgo, the hilltop at 281 metres was the seat of the counts who turned a scatter of huts into a castle, and it remained the settlement's most representative ground through Pisan and then Florentine control. What makes the site unusual today is how legible that sequence has become: the fortress was excavated with modern archaeological methods, consolidated, and reopened in 2008 as an archaeological park with a museum installed in its own cassero. Its remains include tower houses, cisterns and spaces associated with the garrison.

What to notice

The complex occupies a semicircular terrace on the summit, ringed by curtain walls punctuated with bastions. At its core stands the cassero, or dongione, the robust residence-tower that now shelters the Museo della Rocca. The surviving stretch of crenellated wall includes a mullioned bifora window of the noble residence, dated by the municipality to the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. An ancient cistern once secured the garrison's water. A more curious feature is the aqueduct of the 1930s that crosses the park — a reminder that the hill kept working into modern times. Excavated everyday objects, a cuirass, a helmet and weapons document aspects of domestic and military life.

Context and history

Campiglia first enters the written record in 1004, in a donation deed to the Benedictine monastery of Santa Maria di Serena that surfaced in the archives of the counts della Gherardesca. The operator's history traces settlement on the hill back to an eighth- or ninth-century hamlet. Through the thirteenth century the Rocca's buildings housed a branch of the della Gherardesca, the family credited with raising the site from a village of huts to a castle, while from the twelfth century a borgo of Pisan-style tower houses spread across the terraces below, wrapped in a heavy stone wall. Political conflict brought a Pisan military garrison into part of the fortress, which held it until the early fifteenth century; after the Florentine conquest, troops from Florence occupied the Rocca in turn until the mid-sixteenth century. Excavations directed from the 1990s by Riccardo Francovich, with Giovanna Bianchi of the University of Siena, then turned the hill into a textbook of medieval archaeology before the restored complex opened on 7 June 2008.