Castel dell'Ovo

The castle stands on Megaride, a tufa islet off Monte Echia joined to the shore by a thin neck of rock. Greek settlers from Cumae founded the harbour settlement of Palaeopolis here, older neighbour of Neapolis. In the first century BC Lucius Licinius Lucullus built a villa on the island with a very rich library; the site was still called Castrum Lucullanum in the late Roman period.

Valentinian III fortified the villa in the mid-fifth century, and in 476 the deposed Romulus Augustulus, one of the last Western emperors, was exiled to it. Monks came at the end of that century, called from Pannonia with the relics of the abbot Severinus; Eugippius founded a monastery on the site after 492. By the seventh century they had taken the Benedictine rule and built an important scriptorium, probably from what survived of Lucullus's library.

In 872 Saracens imprisoned Bishop Athanasius of Naples on the islet, by then known as San Salvatore; the combined fleets of the Duchy of Naples and the Republic of Amalfi freed him and drove them off. The monastic complex and the old fortifications were afterwards pulled down so that raiders could not use them again. A document of 1128 names a stronghold on the rock again, the Arx Sancti Salvatoris, after the church the monks had built.

Conquering Naples in 1140, Roger the Norman built the first castle proper on the site, on the older ruins; the architect Buono completed it. Systematic fortification of the rock began with him, its first bulwark the Torre Normandia. It was lived in only occasionally: with Castel Capuano finished, the city's growth and trade had turned landward.

In 1191 the Empress Constance, Roger's daughter, was taken during her struggle with her nephew Tancred for the crown of Sicily. The Sicilian chancellor Matthew d'Ajello pressed Tancred to shut her in the island castle, officially the Castrum Salvatoris ad Mare, where she would be better guarded and cut off from people. She was released the following year and became Queen of Sicily. The kingdom passed to the Swabians through her, and in 1222 Frederick II raised the towers of Colleville, Maestra and Mezzo.

The name belongs to a legend. Virgil kept a medieval reputation as a great sorcerer and foreteller, and the story runs that he hid in the castle's vaults a magic egg that held the fortress up — break it, and not only would the castle fall but disasters would follow for Naples. When an earthquake in 1370 brought down part of the arch the castle rests on, Queen Joanna is said to have sworn that she had replaced the egg, to stop panic spreading. The egg surfaced no earlier than the late Middle Ages, probably invented to explain a nickname already in the documents of Charles I of Anjou — a name owed to the oval shape Roger's rebuilding had given the place.

Charles I of Anjou, who reigned from 1266 to 1285, moved his court to the new Castel Nuovo, and Castel dell'Ovo's importance began to decline — though the royal treasure stayed there, with the seat of the Royal Chamber and the State Treasury. It was a prison too. Conradin was held here in 1268 before his trial and beheading in the Piazza del Mercato, as were the children of Manfred, King of Sicily, after their father's defeat at Benevento. In 1381 Queen Joanna I, forced to surrender to her nephew Charles of Durazzo, was imprisoned in the castle where she had lived as sovereign.

Alfonso V of Aragon enriched the royal apartments, restored the mole and lowered the towers; his son Ferrante I had to bombard it to recover it after French troops sacked it. The French of Louis XII and the Spanish of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba battered it again, and in 1503 the siege by Ferdinand the Catholic finished what remained of the towers. The rebuilding that followed gave the castle its present form: with bombards replacing the older throwing engines, the octagonal towers went up again, the walls thickened, the defences turned inland rather than out to sea.

Under the Spanish viceroys and Bourbons it lost its standing as a royal residence and became a garrison post — the Spanish shelled the city from it during Masaniello's revolt — and a prison that held Tommaso Campanella before his death sentence and later the liberals Carlo Poerio, Luigi Settembrini and Francesco De Sanctis. Its guns were used again in the clashes of the Neapolitan Republic of 1799. A scheme of 1871 proposed pulling it down for a new quarter; instead the fortifications were extensively repaired from 1975.