Castel Nuovo

Charles I of Anjou took the throne of Sicily in 1266, having beaten the Hohenstaufen, and moved the capital from Palermo to Naples. The royal residence had been Castel Capuano, but the old Norman fortress was judged inadequate and the king wanted a castle by the sea, a palace as much as a fortification. The project went to the French architect Pierre de Chaulnes; the Castrum Novum was begun in 1279 and finished just three years later, fast work for the period.

Charles never lived in it. The War of the Sicilian Vespers cost his house the crown of Sicily, taken by Peter III of Aragon, and the new palace stood unused until 1285, the year of his death. Charles II then moved family and court in.

On 13 December 1294 the main hall saw Pope Celestine V, the hermit Pietro da Morrone, give up the papal throne — the act Dante called the great refusal. Eleven days later, in the same hall, the cardinals elected Benedetto Caetani, who took the name Boniface VIII and moved his seat straight to Rome to get clear of Angevin interference.

Robert, king from 1309, rebuilt and enlarged the castle and made it a centre of patronage: Petrarch and Boccaccio stayed here, and Giotto painted the Palatine Chapel around 1332 and a throne-room cycle of the illustrious men and women of antiquity. That cycle is lost, known now only from a mention in a collection of sonnets of 1350.

From 1343 the castle was the residence of Joanna I. In 1347 she fled towards France and abandoned it to the army of Louis I of Hungary, come to avenge his brother Andrew, Joanna's husband, killed in a palace plot the queen was suspected of instigating. The castle was looted, and on her return she was forced into a radical rebuilding. When Louis came against Naples a second time it held. It was taken again by Charles III, then by Louis II, who prised it from Charles's son Ladislaus; Ladislaus regained the throne in 1399 and lived here until his death in 1414.

His sister Joanna II succeeded as the last Angevin ruler, and to her the castle owes a story told for centuries: a trapdoor dropping her used-up lovers into the cellars, to a crocodile said to have swum from Africa.

Alfonso V of Aragon won the throne of Naples in 1443 and set out to keep a court here to rival the Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici. The fortress was rebuilt completely by Guillem Sagrera, a Mallorca-born Catalan architect working in Catalan Gothic terms: five round towers, four of them incorporating the square Angevin work beneath, built to take the blows of the guns of the time.

The main gate was remade as a white marble triumphal arch commemorating Alfonso's entry into Naples in 1443, 35 metres tall in two stacked arches. Work ran from 1453 and was finished only in 1479, after the king's death. Modern authorities give the design to Francesco Laurana; above its frieze runs the inscription ALFONSVS REGUM PRINCEPS HANC CONDIDIT ARCEM.

Alfonso's son Ferdinand I faced the Conspiracy of the Barons, a revolt against Aragonese centralisation led by Antonello Sanseverino, Prince of Salerno, and Francesco Coppola, Count of Sarno. The king invited the conspirators to the great hall for a wedding party billed as a reconciliation; when they came he had his soldiers bar the doors and arrested them all; Coppola and his sons were among those put to death. The room has been the Hall of the Barons ever since.

Charles VIII of France sacked the castle during his expedition of 1494. With the fall of Ferdinand II in 1496 and of Frederick in 1503 the kingdom passed to Ferdinand II of Aragon, who ruled it through a viceroy, and Castel Nuovo became a military garrison rather than a royal seat. Charles V stayed briefly in 1535, but the viceroy kept it only until the early 17th century, when a new palace took over.

The viceregal centuries stripped it. The Angevin cross-windows were replaced by bare masonry and four frescoes by Giotto in the Palatine Chapel erased: the Spanish had reason to blot out the memory of Angevin and Aragonese Naples alike. Polygonal bastions went up round the walls, and the ground between silted up with sheds.

The Parthenopean Republic was proclaimed here in 1799; the artillery arsenal and pyrotechnic works it then housed were judged safer moved to Torre Annunziata in 1837. Clearance began in 1923, and within a year the encroaching buildings were gone; restoration ran on until 1939. Only the citadel gate was spared, the Aragonese entrance rebuilt in 1496 by Frederick of Naples, whose arms still stand on its arch.