Castello di Caccamo

The crag at Caccamo commands the valley of the San Leonardo and the country around it, and is thought to have carried an Arab fortress or watchtower before the Normans came. The castle that survives was given its Norman shape by Matteo Bonello, lord of Caccamo, in the twelfth century, in the years after the reconquest of the island. It is among the largest and best preserved of the Norman castles of Sicily, and one of the largest in Italy.

In 1160 a group of Norman barons met in one of the castle's rooms and laid a plot against William I of Sicily. The rebellion was uncovered and put down before it could take hold. The room is still called the Sala della Congiura, the Conspiracy Hall, and is the best known in the building.

Giovanni di Saint-Rémy, prefect for King Charles I of Anjou, fled Palermo at the outbreak of the Sicilian Vespers and took refuge in the castle; the people of Caccamo caught him inside it and put him to death.

In the fourteenth century the Chiaramonte, beginning with Manfredi I Chiaramonte, made radical alterations to the complex, and smaller structural work went on being layered over their scheme into the seventeenth century. The marriage in 1480 of Fadrique Enríquez, admiral of Castile, to the last of the Prades-Cabrera line opened a long decline, which ended only when Filippo Amato, prince of Galati, took the property as liquidator of the indebted Enríquez.

The Amato bought the barony of Caccamo in 1646, and Philip III of Sicily raised it to a duchy; the family held it until 1813. Their building campaigns went hard at what the Chiaramonte had left, sweeping away medieval structures and turning the castle into a lordly residence of great rooms with painted wooden ceilings and frescoed friezes. The complex reached its greatest extent in these years, and lost the strategic character it had carried until then. After 1813 the De Spucches, princes of Galati, held it as the new Dukes of Caccamo and put it through a drastic restoration in period style.

In 1823 an earthquake brought down the Torre Mastra, the great tower. It was the first blow in a decay that, for all the efforts of the De Spucches, ran on into collapses across the whole complex; further parts of the castle came down in an earthquake in 1923. Descendants of the Dukes of Caccamo lived on in the castle until October 1963, when the Region of Sicily bought it; by then it was a ruin.

Restoration funded by the Region began in 1974, and work started in 2012 on fitting out MAAC, the castle's museum of ancient arms. The castle is protected as Italian national heritage and is open to the public, with a restaurant on the ground floor and other rooms used for conferences and meetings.