Castel Sismondo

Castel Sismondo was conceived as fortress and palace at once, meant to make the lord's power over Rimini visible. Work began in 1437 at an hour Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta fixed on his court astrologers' calculations, 6.48 in the evening. Court writers celebrated Sigismondo himself as the architect; he was more plausibly the project's originator and coordinator, out of his experience as a condottiere. Filippo Brunelleschi was called to Rimini in 1438 to survey the principal fortresses of the signoria, staying two months, while Cristoforo Foschi and Matteo Nuti worked on the fabric before his arrival and were still at it in 1454.

The rocca rose partly on what was already there: a fortified complex built by Sigismondo's brother and predecessor Galeotto Roberto, thirteenth-century Malatesta houses, and a short stretch of the Frederician city walls. The sixteenth-century historian Baldo Branchi records that the lord pulled down the old palaces of his forebears, sparing only the palazzo maggiore. To clear a margin around the ditch an entire block came down, the baptistery of San Giovanni, the convent of Santa Caterina and the bishop's palace among it, and the top of the cathedral campanile was taken down for defensive reasons. The inscription over the city gate declares that Sigismondo raised it new from its foundations in 1446 and ruled that it be called by his own name; work ran on to 1454, and the fortress may never have been completed to the original design.

The complex was ringed by an enormous dry ditch, prepared for flooding. Within a high, irregular outer circuit lay two great open spaces, the corte a mare facing the city and the corte del soccorso facing the countryside, each held by its own garrison and castellan. Quarters for soldiers were scant, and the garrison must have been very small.

The curtains were built far stouter than usual and the great square towers each housed a bronze cannon, a fortification built in the modern way against the destructive force of firearms. Although the castle stood outside the city, not one tower faces that way: all are turned towards Rimini, an arrangement read as evidence the castle was built to defend the lord from a revolt of his subjects before it was built to defend the city from enemies outside. Roberto Valturio, in his De re militari, magnified its 160 windows, six towers of 80 feet and four bridges, and reckoned it not merely the city's essential defence but a cause of admiration for the whole of Italy.

Malatesta died in the castle on 7 October 1468. The decline of the Malatesta signoria at the end of the fifteenth century opened a long decadence: the castle was turned to military purposes alone, losing its character as a residence, and was reworked against the rapid development of firearms. Documents record underground passages that could be ridden through, and trapdoors over razor pits used with cruelty by Pandolfo IV, known as Pandolfaccio.

In 1503, during the brief Venetian domination, the provveditore Vincenzo Valier inspected the castle and judged it ballistically inadequate to modern defence. The oldest surviving plan of Castel Sismondo, drawn in 1526 by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, documents polygonal bastions in place of the fifteenth-century quadrangular ones. Between 1624 and 1626 gun embrasures were added, the tops of the towers taken down to seat mortars and the ravelin facing the countryside demolished, and the fortress took the name Castel Urbano in honour of Urban VIII.

In 1821 the castle was given over as barracks for the Carabinieri. In 1826 came further alteration: the outer circuit and bulwarks were destroyed, the ditch filled, the third tower demolished and a salt warehouse built against the bastions. The corte a mare went with the outer circuit and left no trace. It served as barracks, then as a depot, and from 1857 as a prison, a use it kept until 1967.

A general restoration directed by Carla Tomasini Pietramellara opened the castle to the public and made its building phases legible. The work brought Roman and early medieval remains to light — a stretch of late imperial wall following exactly the south-western front of the keep, a gate and a tower's foundations — left visible in the exhibition route. From 2019 work has been under way to recover three of the eastern ditch's six metres of depth.

Only the central nucleus of the castle survives. Protected as Italian national heritage, it has since 2021 been one of the three sites of the Fellini Museum.