Castello Sarriod de la Tour

Below the vineyards of Saint-Pierre, Sarriod de la Tour Castle keeps one of the strangest rooms in the Aosta Valley: a first-floor chamber whose wooden ceiling is carved with a crowd of grotesque heads. Around it stand seven centuries of building phases, from a square keep to rounded gun-age towers.

Why it matters

Most Valdostan castles impress with mass and silhouette. This one earns its reputation with carpentry. The so-called sala delle teste, the hall of heads, takes its name from a fifteenth-century beamed ceiling whose corbels and beams carry a procession of carved faces, and the municipal heritage publication records that dendrochronological analysis dated that timber to 1431-1432. The castle is also a readable compendium of defensive architecture: a donjon with crenellated walls of the classic tenth-to-twelfth century type, fifteenth-century living quarters grafted onto the keep, a chapel rebuilt in 1478 with painted exteriors, and later circular towers added as artillery changed how walls had to answer attack. Few buildings of this size compress so many stages of Alpine feudal life into one circuit.

What to notice

• The carved ceiling of the hall of heads on the first floor: look for the

variety of expressions among the grotesque figures, not just their number.

• The eastern entrance portal, a pointed arch whose sculpted archivolt bears

the Sarriod coat of arms, flanked by the late fifteenth-century round and semicircular defensive towers.

• The spiral staircase, called the viret, and the fourteenth-century crossed

mullioned windows cut in dressed stone, both inserted when Jean Sarriod rebuilt the residence in 1420 for representational use.

• The chapel dedicated to the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist, altered

in 1478 by Antoine Sarriod de la Tour, when exterior frescoes of the Crucifixion and Saint Christopher were painted and the bell-gable raised.

• The contrast between the rough fortified core and the polished state rooms,

including early eighteenth-century wall paintings and a stucco fireplace.

Context and history

The Sarriod family is documented from the twelfth century, linked politically but not by blood to the lords of Bard, and their earliest seat here followed the standard Valdostan plan: chapel, square central tower and enclosure wall. In 1420 Jean Sarriod raised a residence worthy of reception and ceremony, adding the staircase and fine windows to the donjon. Antoine Sarriod de la Tour renewed the chapel in 1478, and by the end of that century the curtain walls had gained their rounded towers and the new eastern entrance with the armorial portal. Later centuries brought the eastern range in the sixteenth century, a north corner tower in the seventeenth, and the painted and stuccoed interiors of the early eighteenth. The family held the castle until 1923, when it passed to the Bensa family of Genoa; the Autonomous Region of Valle d'Aosta acquired it in 1970 and has retained it as regional heritage.