Arechi Castle

The castle's oldest fabric began as a Byzantine castrum, raised in the 6th century over the remains of an earlier Roman stronghold; the surviving tufa masonry, laid in large squared blocks, and the primitive core of a rectangular keep built on five or six levels to watch the port below and the roads toward Nuceria Alfaterna belong to this period.

Salerno then lay within the Duchy of Benevento, the southernmost part of the Lombard kingdom. After Charlemagne's assault on the Lombards in 774, the duke, Arechi II, moved his seat of power from Benevento to Salerno to strengthen his hold on the coastline and secure communications across Campania; under him the castle became the northern anchor of a triangular circuit of walls that ran down the slopes of Monte Bonadies to enclose the city as far as the sea.

In 1077 Robert Guiscard besieged Salerno. Paul the Deacon's Historia Longobardorum had already praised the city's defences as unmatched in Italy, but hunger eventually forced the garrison to negotiate a surrender. The Normans who then held the city left the keep largely untouched, raising its wall lines instead and building, on a rocky spur to the north, a watchtower called the Bastiglia, sited to cover ground the keep itself could not see.

Frederick II of Swabia listed the keep among fortifications needing repair, though little else survives from his reign archaeologically. The Angevins did more: they added new wings and cisterns, built curtain walls pierced with arrow slits, with gun embrasures added beneath them later, and installed a bath complex fed by the cisterns. Urgent repairs were recorded as needed in 1274, and the last recorded Angevin work is dated to 1299.

Under the Aragonese the castle reached its fullest extent, with large new wings built east of the parade ground; finds of Neapolitan and Florentine maiolica and pottery from nearby Vietri sul Mare show it housed lords of rank rather than soldiers alone. Once it had lost its defensive purpose, the Sanseverino princes, feudal lords of Salerno, used rooms beside the entrance as a summer residence. The English traveller Thomas Hoby, received there between 1547 and 1564, recorded climbing the bare rock to reach it, since the road later built between Vietri and Salerno did not yet exist.

The castle suffered heavy damage in the earthquake of 1694 and stood abandoned afterwards. In 1820 it was the site of a Carbonari conspiracy aimed at sparking a popular uprising, which collapsed when one of the plotters betrayed it. Only with Italian unification in 1861 was a first small reconstruction started.

Partial rebuilding through the late 1950s reopened most of the castle to the public. Its last private owners, the Counts Quaranta of Fossalopara, sold the site to the Province of Salerno on 19 December 1960, and archaeological campaigns run from 1991 by the province's museums directorate and the University of Salerno's medieval archaeology centre traced its later development, followed by a wider restoration project from 2000. Designated Italian national heritage, the castle was later bought from Salerno's commune by a private company, which added a restaurant inside; its defensive walls remain open to visitors free of charge, and its museum holds coins and medieval ceramics recovered during the works. Lit at night, it is visible from much of Salerno below.