Fénis Castle

Fénis first enters the record in a document of 1242, where a castrum Fenitii is listed as the property of Godfrey of Challant, Viscount of Aosta, and his brothers — one of the great families of the Aosta Valley and vassals of the House of Savoy, from whom they held the viscounty. The castle of that date was a more modest affair, probably comprising a dovecote tower on the south side, a square tower, a central residential block and a single ring of wall. The hilltop it occupies may once have carried a Roman villa, though unlike at Issogne no remains have yet been found to prove it.

For all its towers and double crenellated curtain, Fénis was never a fortress in earnest. Unlike Verrès or Ussel, built on rocky spurs to be defended, it sits on a low knoll with no natural protection; the double wall seems to have served chiefly for show, and the whole complex could house only around sixty people — family, guests, garrison and servants together.

Most of what stands today was raised between about 1320 and 1420. Aymon of Challant inherited the fief from his grandfather Ebalo the Great in 1337 and from 1340 gave the castle its pentagonal plan — probably by enclosing earlier buildings — together with the outer curtain wall and many of the towers. His son Boniface I inherited in 1387 and, after two years as inspector of fortifications at the court of Savoy, launched a second great campaign in 1392 to bring the house up to the standards of courtly life: the floors of the central block were realigned, a new storey was won from the attic, a new west wing closed the inner courtyard, and the semicircular stone staircase and two tiers of wooden balconies took their present form, along with the prison.

Under Boniface I the castle reached its greatest splendour — a rich court surrounded by a vegetable plot, a vineyard and a garden where the lord and his guests could relax. He commissioned the Piedmontese painter Giacomo Jaquerio to fresco the chapel and courtyard, and the Saint George killing the dragon that crowns the staircase, painted around 1415, is attributed to Jaquerio's workshop and bears the monogram BMS, read as the initials of its patron. Along the balconies runs a procession of sages holding scrolls of proverbs in old French, among them a figure in Arab costume, perhaps recalling a Challant on crusade. A poem on one wall, attributed to Boniface himself on the marriage of his daughter Bona to Jean Allamant, lord of Uriage, is held to be among the oldest written examples of the region's spoken French.

Boniface I's death in 1426 opened an economic decline for the Challant-Fénis line, and building at the castle all but stopped. His son Boniface II commissioned frescoes of saints from Giacomino da Ivrea for the courtyard's east side, but for roughly two hundred and fifty years afterwards almost nothing new was built. In 1705 the branch died out with Antoine Gaspard Félix, and the castle passed to a cousin, Georges-François of Challant-Châtillon, who in 1716 was forced to sell it for 90,000 lire to Count Baldassarre Saluzzo di Paesana to meet his debts.

There followed a long period of true decay and changing hands. The Saluzzo di Paesana held Fénis until 1798, when it was sold to Pietro Gaspare Ansermin; his family sold it on in 1863 to Michele Baldassarre Rosset di Quart. By then the castle had been abandoned and stripped of its furniture, and was serving as a farmhouse — a stable on the ground floor, a hayloft above.

The architect Alfredo d'Andrade had already used the courtyard of Fénis as the model for the Borgo Medievale built at Turin for the exposition of 1884. On 3 September 1895 Giuseppe Rosset, Italian consul at Odessa, sold the castle to the Italian State for 15,000 lire in a purchase negotiated by d'Andrade, and it was declared a national monument in 1896. From 1898 to 1920 d'Andrade, a follower of Viollet-le-Duc, and after him Bertea and Seglie ran a first campaign aimed simply at arresting the ruin — shoring up unsafe walls, remaking roofs and floors, and cutting a new access road from the east.

A second campaign from 1935, under the minister Cesare Maria De Vecchi and the architect Vittorio Mesturino, deliberately heightened the castle's medieval appearance, at some cost to the legibility of the original fabric, and fitted out the empty rooms as a museum of Valdostan furnishing with pieces bought on the antiques market. The castle now belongs to the Autonomous Region of Aosta Valley and is open through guided visits.