Malaspina Castle

Massa enters the written record in the ninth century. A manuscript of 882 in the episcopal archive of Lucca names a curtis at a place called Quarantula, identified by some with the ground the castle would later occupy; the name survives in the Porta Quaranta of the medieval walls. The hill commands the coast from the promontory of Corvo as far as Livorno, and was fortified by about the year 1000.

Around the tenth century the district passed to the Obertenghi, descendants of Oberto I, a count palatine of a line springing from the Lombard dukes of Tuscia. Oberto ruled the March of eastern Liguria, which took in Massa, and his family had marked the hill as the strategic base of their dominion; it was they who raised the first nucleus of the castle. When Oberto I died in 975 his son Adalberto I inherited the castrum of Massa and the lands about it. The marquises were deep in the politics of the age and seldom resident, and it was Adalberto IV Rufo, who came to power in 1080, who first lived in the castle permanently. A castle on this hill is documented in 1164. Through the twelfth century Massa lay in the path of Lucca, Pisa and Genoa, and the decades were tormented ones.

Quiet came with the marquis Andrea, who in 1208 made an act of vassalage to Lucca. The calm let him begin draining the marshy ground below, and in 1211 the marchioness Giorgia had a hospital for pilgrims built on the banks of the Lavello. By 1215 the family's only heir was Benedetta, and in 1218, in exchange for a loan, she gave the rocca of Massa to Lucca as security and put up houses in the Conca.

Massa remained under Lucchese rule through the rest of the thirteenth century, and in 1269 political discord with the townspeople brought the army of Lucca against the castle, which was levelled to the ground. Not until 1315 did Uguccione della Faggiola, lord of Pisa and Lucca, hand the rocca back to the old Obertengo marquises of Massa, who set about restoring it. The castle is remembered too for a visit by Dante Alighieri, who is said to have looked down from it into the great funnel-shaped cave below, ringed by ledges converging on the stream, and to have taken from the sight the descending circles of his Hell.

Already in 1316 Castruccio Castracani became lord of Lucca and obliged the lords of Massa to come to terms, buying them out of the dominion of the district for a few privileges. He was at least a builder: he had the central keep rebuilt, added further towers and a drawbridge, enlarged the curtain wall, and made the rocca the base of his power.

In 1345 Massa and its castle returned to descendants of the Obertenghi, the Malaspina of Fosdinovo, part of the territory passing to the marquis Spinetta Malaspina; on his death the family lost the district again to Lucca. In the 1430s the people of Massa, tired of suffering the turns of other men's wars, swore fealty to the marquis of Fosdinovo Antonio Alberico I, a citizen of Florence from 1430. Florence, uneasy at the growing weight of Milan and Genoa, welcomed a new state that let it watch its rivals from close at hand.

The Malaspina lordship began on 8 December 1442, when the Boni Homines made their act of submission in the church of San Jacopo. The chapters Antonio Alberico I granted his people were generous: goods could be exported untaxed, duties could be set on imports and on outsiders at will, and the townsmen were free to give themselves new statutes or amend the old. He and his son Jacopo added fortifications and much improved the residential side of the fortress; the palace that became the marquises' dwelling belongs to the end of the fifteenth century.

When the father died in 1467 his goods were divided among five sons, and the vicariate of Massa fell to Jacopo Malaspina, invested as marquis, who sought to enlarge his power by buying Carrara and Avenza in 1473. The Renaissance range of the castle, with its umbrella-vaulted rooms, was built by Jacopo and his third wife Taddea. Antonio Alberico II, third marquis of Massa, went on embellishing the rocca but had only daughters, and obtained from Charles V that Ricciarda should become marchioness of Massa on his death, which came in 1519.

With that the Malaspina line was extinguished. Ricciarda's house joined with that of the Genoese Lorenzo Cybo, count of Ferentillo, and from the match came the Cybo-Malaspina dynasty. Two diplomas, in 1529 and 1530, secured her from Charles V the investiture of her father's throne and the right to pass it to her children, but the question of which child brought war. Her son Giulio, who under his grandfather's will should have succeeded her, was passed over for her second-born Alberico; with the help of his father Lorenzo and of the Medici and the Doria, Giulio laid siege to the castle of Massa and took it. After only two years Ricciarda, supported by Charles V, had herself reinstated and imposed her son's surrender, and Giulio was beheaded in 1549 as a traitor to the emperor. Ricciarda died at Bagni di Lucca in 1553, passing power to Alberico I Cybo-Malaspina.

Alberico I was invested with the marquisate by the emperor himself in 1554, and with him the Cybo-Malaspina lordship of Massa began. He started the city's circuit of walls and the restoration of the building that became the ducal palace, into which he moved in 1568, the year the emperor Maximilian II raised the marquisate of Massa to a principality. His interest in the castle was largely military: he added wall-walks above the walls and built a new wing fitted out for artillery, with gun embrasures. The keep, cut from the living rock, dates from the middle of the sixteenth century and is credited to Alberico and Ricciarda jointly.

With the opening of the seventeenth century the castle ceased to be a residence, and what was done to it afterwards was military work: the imposing south-west bulwark of 1603, for the building of which the semicircular tower at the west corner was probably demolished, and the recutting of the gun embrasures along the perimeter curtain. Little of the medieval fabric came through the rebuilding of 1400 to 1600; among what survives is the base of a small quadrangular tower, part of a medieval fortification on the summit of the hill, enclosed within a sixteenth-century bastion built to defend the munitions store.

After the middle of the seventeenth century the rocca had a purely military function, and with the unification of Italy it was given over to use as a prison, which it remained until 1946. The rooms and the palace chapel, with its loggias and marble decoration, once held Renaissance frescoes and sculpture; the sculptures are lost, as is the historic effigy of Alberico I. The castle has since been restored and reopened to the public, is listed as Italian national heritage, and now houses museum collections.