Fortilizio di Cibottola

Above the Nestore valley at Cibottola, a medieval castle keeps its drawbridge gate, a seven-sided twenty-metre tower with a half-tonne bell, the castellan's rooms and an underground passage running off along the hillside — a fortified circuit you can still read almost end to end.

Why it matters

The regional tourism portal describes the fortilizio's entrance gate, seven-sided tower and bell, part of the castellan's dwelling, and an underground passage along the hillside. The Trasimeno heritage record confirms the substance behind the listing: most of the old curtain wall survives with a circular corner tower, and the heptagonal tower — roughly twenty metres tall — was restored at the end of the twentieth century and reappointed as the village's civic tower. Set at 471 metres on a spur commanding the Nestore valley, the castle preserves the characteristic elements of a small Umbrian fortification.

What to notice

At the gate, the recess for the drawbridge winding gear remains legible in the masonry. The tower its base is genuinely seven-sided, and inside hangs a bell of some 500 kilograms, gifted in 1850 by Pietro Tocchi, rector of the University of Perugia, whose family then owned the castle and much of the surrounding land. The castellan's quarters adjoin the gate — the regional portal includes them in its description — and from them, heritage sources describe an underground passage about five hundred metres long that runs along the slope of the hill, once an escape or service route Outside the gate, the perimeter walls with their round corner tower, and the panorama over the valley toward the castle of Sant'Apollinare, explain why the site was fortified in the first place. The parish church of San Fortunato stands within the same enclosure, completing the castle-and-church pairing typical of the region.

Context and history

The castle's origins are argued rather than settled: tradition pushed by some local historians dated the foundation to 1330, but other sources place a first stronghold as early as the ninth century, and the documented record shows a village named as a villa without walls in 1282, fortified during the first half of the fourteenth century and listed as a castrum in the Perugian census of 1380. What follows is a microcosm of the Perugian contado: the arenaria quarries of the abbey of San Pietro drew building stone from this territory from the thirteenth century; Braccio Fortebraccio da Montone received the castle's keys here after his victory of 1416; the community paid levies toward the captain of the countryside and won tax remissions in 1462 and 1554 expressly to repair its walls. Ownership passed from the Crispolti to the Scotti and, in the early eighteenth century, to the Tocchi, who held it with an estate of about a thousand hectares; tradition also holds that figures such as Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Anthony of Padua passed through. In 1850 the Tocchi bell arrived in the tower; by the late twentieth century restoration had made the tower civic again.