Castel Capuano

Construction began in 1160 under the architect Buono, for William I of Sicily, called the Bad, son of Roger the Norman. The building was defensive, with heavy fortifications, austere rooms and a natural vocation as a military garrison, and it takes its name from its position beside Porta Capuana, where the road left the city walls for ancient Capua. After Castel dell'Ovo it is the oldest castle in Naples.

In 1231 Frederick II ordered the first transformation: the fortifications were kept, but the castle was made more hospitable and better suited to lodging the sovereign when he passed through Naples. Frederick made his trusted man Dipoldo di Dragoni castellan and used the castle to hold important political prisoners.

With the coming of the Angevins, the building of Castel Nuovo in 1279–82 gave the sovereigns of Naples a new home, and Castel Capuano was left to members of the royal family, officials and distinguished guests — Petrarch lodged there in 1370 as legate of Clement VI. Under Giovanna I (1343–1382) the castle was restored after a devastating sack by the troops of Louis I of Hungary, who were then forced to abandon the city by the arrival of the Black Death.

Ladislaus the Magnanimous (1399–1414) briefly took the castle back as his own residence. His sister Giovanna II (1414–1435) was driven to shelter within its walls during her struggle with Alfonso V of Aragon, who had set up his court in Castel Nuovo; the Aragonese laid siege and had to give it up before the impregnability of the refuge. From here the queen left for Aversa, where she named Louis III of Anjou her heir against the repudiated Alfonso. The queen's favourite, Sergianni Caracciolo, was stabbed in his room in the castle by four knights in her service, on 19 August 1432 or 23 August 1433, and put to death on the sovereign's own order.

Under the Aragonese the castle was swallowed into the new circuit of city walls and lost its role as a defensive bulwark. In the years after the conquest of Naples, Alfonso of Aragon used it as his principal dynastic residence while Castel Nuovo was rebuilt, having it hung with Flemish tapestries and frescoed by the Valencian painter Jacomart Baco. Its most splendid hour as a house of state came in the 1470s to 1490s, when Alfonso II of Naples, duke of Calabria, made it the fulcrum of a system of leisure residences in the east of the city; the architect was probably Giuliano da Maiano, who also raised the new Porta Capuana. Wedding festivities for Sigismund I of Poland and Bona Sforza were held in its halls in 1517.

With the Kingdom of Naples annexed to the Spanish crown and made a viceroyalty in 1503, the houses of the Aragonese kings and princes fell into decline. Castel Capuano's swan song as a royal seat came in 1535, when Charles V lodged there for some months on his return from the reconquest of Tunis, celebrated the marriage of Filippo di Lannoy, prince of Sulmona, to Isabella Colonna, making the prince a gift of the castle as he left.

In 1537 the viceroy don Pedro de Toledo confiscated the building from its owner and turned it into the tribunal of the kingdom, gathering under one roof the courts scattered across the city: the Sacro Regio Consiglio, the Regia Camera della Sommaria, the Gran Corte della Vicaria and the Tribunale della Zecca. The architects Ferdinando Manlio and Giovanni Benincasa stripped out every typically military structure, and the cellars were given over to a prison equipped with torture chambers. Over the entrance the arms of Emperor Charles V are still visible, and a tablet on the portal celebrates the victory at Tunis and the date the castle became the seat of the Court of Justice.

The deepest alteration since don Pedro came in 1856–58 under the engineer Giovanni Riegler, called in to repair a structural failure: the main façade was renewed, the balconies turned back into windows and the ground-floor arcades disappeared. After the unification of Italy the Bourbon shield on the outer front was replaced by that of the House of Savoy. A simple column on a pillar, the Colonna della Vicaria, once stood before the entrance and was used to disgrace and punish debtors.

The civil and criminal sections of the Naples tribunal have since moved to the Centro Direzionale, and on 15 May 2023 the castle became the operational seat of the Scuola Superiore della Magistratura. Listed as Italian national heritage, it is under conservative restoration on European funds, after which it is to reopen to the public.