Castel Thun

Castel Thun rises above the apple orchards of the lower Val di Non, one of the few Trentino castles still furnished as the counts of Thun left it. Acquired by the Autonomous Province of Trento in 1992 and opened as a museum in 2010, it combines a princely art collection with bastioned walls and walled gardens.

Why it matters

Castel Thun retains furnishings from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, preserving the character of a noble residence. The Thun family lived here from the Middle Ages into the twentieth century, and grew into one of the most powerful feudal houses of the Trentino, with a branch that reached the highest ranks of the Habsburg world. Their picture gallery of nearly 400 paintings alone — portraits, landscapes, still lifes, sacred and mythological subjects — includes works attributed to Jacopo Bassano, Camillo Procaccini and Francesco Guardi. Since 2010 the castle has been the fourth seat of the Buonconsiglio museum circuit, alongside Castel Beseno, Castel Stenico and Castel Caldes.

What to notice

The Stanza del Vescovo has its walls and coffered ceiling are lined entirely in stone pine, with a majolica stove as the centrepiece. More than forty furnished rooms include the dining room with its nineteenth-century tables, the Sala della Spinetta with its harpsichord, the Sala degli Antenati hung with family portraits, and a library of several thousand volumes. The Galleria delle Carrozze in the cellars holds carriages and sleighs, mostly from the second half of the nineteenth century. The defences include you enter across a moat and drawbridge through the Porta Spagnola, and lunette bastions and towers wrap the baronial palace. An eighteen-column stone colonnade flanked by two medieval prison towers marks the route uphill. The chapel of San Giorgio contains frescoes of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries attributed to the school of Jacopo Sunter. Count Matteo Thun devised the audio guide.

Context and history

The castle began in the thirteenth century as a single keep on the hill then called Belvesino, and the family that took it over — the Tono, who Germanised their name to Thun — held it from the prince-bishops of Trento and made it their main seat. Buildings multiplied inside the walls from the fourteenth century, and by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the complex had taken its present form: a Gothic residence shielded by towers, bastioned walls and a moat, with interiors later updated in Renaissance and baroque taste. The eighteenth century brought the most decisive remodelling: floors were regularised, the roof rebuilt, and the noble floor transformed in its second half into the sequence of reception rooms seen today. Fires repeatedly marked the building's history, yet the family never left; the castle remained their home until the twentieth century. In 1992 the Autonomous Province of Trento bought the complex, restored it, catalogued the furnishings and inventoried the family archive, and opened it to the public in 2010.