Castello Ursino

Castello Ursino was built between 1239 and 1250 as one of the royal castles of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, with Riccardo da Lentini named as its architect. It closed a chapter that had opened with the death of Frederick's predecessor William II, when local lords across Sicily had pushed to assert their independence; in 1220 Frederick had ordered the destruction of every non-royal castle on the island. The new fortress at Catania was raised both to defend the capital and to press the point of royal power, and it was reckoned impregnable in its day. The plan is a rectangle with a large circular tower at each corner around an open inner court, and a pentagram of black lava stone is set into the east wall.

In 1295, during the Sicilian Vespers, the Parliament that declared James II of Aragon deposed as King of Sicily and put Frederick III in his place met inside these walls, and the castle became the seat of the Sicilian Parliament. The following year it was captured by Robert of Anjou, though it returned to Aragonese hands afterwards. That parliamentary role, more than any siege, is what the castle is chiefly remembered for.

Frederick III lived in the castle, and so did the rulers who followed him: Peter II, Louis, Frederick IV and Maria. It was here in 1392 that Maria was carried off by Guglielmo Raimondo III Moncada, to prevent her marriage to Gian Galeazzo Visconti. King Martin I also held his court in the castle.

Once the capital had moved away from Catania and powder weapons had changed what walls were expected to withstand, the castle lost its military role and was put to use as a prison. It was one of the few buildings in Catania to survive the earthquake of 1693. The ground around it shifted as much as its purpose: built on a cliff looking out to sea, it now stands roughly a kilometre inland after repeated eruptions and earthquakes, and in the 17th century its moat was filled with lava from an eruption of Mount Etna, leaving it ringed by the streets and shops of a Catania piazza.

The city of Catania acquired the castle in 1932 and restored it, and the Museo Civico opened in it on 20 October 1934; further restoration work followed in November 2009. Its holdings include inscriptions from the medieval senate-house where the decision was taken to expel the city's Jewish population in 1492, Michele Rapisardi's painting The Sicilian Vespers, and the only surviving copy of Caravaggio's Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence - made in 1627 by Don Gaspare Orioles da Paolo Geraci, the original having been stolen by the Mafia and never recovered.