Castello di Roccascalegna

The rock that overhangs Roccascalegna, in the Province of Chieti, carried a simple watchtower of Lombard origin before it carried a castle. Its foundation is dated to the eleventh or twelfth century, when that turret was enlarged; by other accounts the principal construction belongs to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, at a time of military rivalry between the Angevin and Aragonese armies. Off the courtyard stand the prison tower and the Angevin tower.

Near the castle, the medieval church of San Pietro was the first church of Roccascalegna and the baron's own chapel; its portal carries the date 1461, though the earliest documents record its completion only around 1568. The castle's own written record begins in 1525, when it is first named, and that first mention is already of repairs to it.

In the sixteenth century the curtain walls were rebuilt higher than the walls they replaced, and left without battlements. Under the lordship of the Annecchino the existing towers were strengthened and a new circular one added to them.

The heaviest building belongs to the Carafa barony, which held the village between 1531 and 1600. The chapel of the Santissimo Rosario was raised in 1577, a single room without ornament of any kind, and the supply of rainwater was improved.

The Corvi held Roccascalegna for the following century and more, from 1600 to 1717, and built here too. Their principal works came after 1705, when the drawbridge was destroyed and the sentry box at the entrance and the protecting wall of the access ramp were put up; a notarial document records that rebuilding. What survives at the gate today are the remains of the drawbridge and, to the right of it, the Tower of the Sentinel.

One legend of the castle turns on the ius primae noctis. In it the baron Corvo de' Corvis claimed the right in 1646, obliging every woman of the village to spend her wedding night with him rather than with the husband she had just married. The last new bride, the story runs - or her lawful husband disguised in her clothes - climbed to the rock for the appointed night and knifed the baron instead; as he died he is said to have left the indelible print of his bloodied hand on a stone.

Popular tradition holds that the print, plainly visible after the collapses of 1940, comes back again and again however many times it has been washed away.

Years of abandonment followed, and with them a succession of falls, among them the collapse in 1940 of the tower called the torre del cuore, named for the coat of arms on the main door. In 1985 the last owners, the Croce Nanni, gave the castle to the comune, which resolved on a restoration. The work began in the 1990s and was finished in 1996, and the castle could be visited again.

The castle is listed as Italian national heritage, belongs to the comune, houses a public museum and takes some thirty thousand visitors a year. It was used as a principal location in the film Tale of Tales.