If castles could talk, La Castiglia overlooking the picturesque north-western Italian town of Saluzzo would have had remarkable tales to tell. Some would be about pride and glory, others about pain and hardship.
Its story would start in 1270 when the Marquis Tommaso I constructed it as a fortress. It might have told about how the nobleman, staring from a porthole across the fertile plains through which the Po River runs in the direction of Milan, muttered self-satisfied to himself that he dared his enemies, not least the troublesome counts of Savoy from across the Alps, to try to scale its towering red-brick walls.
Saluzzo's 750 year-old La Castiglia.
The marquis would have hoped that this latest addition to his ring of fortresses would help bring safety and stability to the region which the Consul Marcus Fulvius had brought under Roman control as far back as 125 BC when he subdued its Ligure and Salluvi tribes.
The story would be about sad times when on the death of the Marquis Manfred IV in 1330 a fight for the throne between his sons from a first and second marriage eventually led to the sacking of the town and the fortress.
It would be about happier times when in 1492 the Marquis Ludovico II restored it to a proper castle by having new apartments, large state rooms and a circular tower built to impress his second wife, a young French woman named Marguerite de Foix.
Calamity would once more be back when in the 16th Century the marquisate lost its independence and the castle fell into such disuse that by 1825 it got turned into a high-security prison.
At this point communication got confused between my Italian guide and me. It happened over one of Saluzzo’s famous sons, the writer Silvio Pellico who during the first half of the 19th Century got jailed by the Austrians for his resistance to their occupation. Deprived of writing material, it is said he wrote parts of his novel Le Mie Prigioni (My Prisons) by cutting himself and using his blood as ink.
We were standing on the piazza below La Castiglia next to the pretty Dancia fountain which dates back to 1763 when, pointing at the iron grids still covering the castle’s windows, my guide in broken English told me Pellico’s story. We could not between us work out for certain whether he meant the writer was held there.My subsequent searches on Google failed to place him in that particular prison.
Whatever the case, incredulously for the normally preservation-minded Italians, the decaying building nearly got demolished before it was decided in 1992 to restore it. It now serves as a cultural and exhibition centre, and as the historic citadel of the pretty town fanning out below it.
Saluzzo town at the foot of the ancient castle on the hill.
Saluzzo hugs a foothill of the Maritime Alps, with Monviso (Mount Viso), one of the range’s most beautiful peaks, at its back. I was there in late October as a guest of the Rome-based Greenaccord international environmental movement when, as a precursor to winter’s snow, the mountains were mostly covered in mist, so I did not get to see it. But one of the town’s favourite publicity pictures shows it etched against the pyramid-shaped peak that towers about 500 metres above the rest. It must be a stunning sight when seen for oneself.
From the piazza at the foot of the castle a cobblestone avenue called the Salita al Castello leads down the hill. On its right it is flanked by gracious buildings that in the times of the marquises belonged to the nobility, their differing architectural styles and facades reflecting the artistic periods in which their owners lived.
Three ladies and their dog enjoy the last rays of the Autumn sun on the Salita al Castello.
On the left is the old town hall and civic bell tower that used to summon the townsfolk for announcements and meetings. A little lane leading off between the buildings passes a faded fresco of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding the baby Jesus. It is said women wanting to conceive go there to pray.
The faded fresco of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding Jesus.
Saluzzo gets referred to sometimes as the Siena of the North. With barely more than 16 000 residents, it is nothing as big and imposing as the provincial capital of Tuscany which, straddling a set of low hills, has a town square big enough to offer a horse race as one of its many tourist attractions.
But the beauty of the little town in the Piedmont, as the area along the foot of the Maritime Alps is known, is the ease with which it, as so much of the rest of Italy, has through the ages succeeded in blending the new with the old.
Thus, continuing along the lane leading past the Virgin Mary fresco, one passes the austere façade of the 14th Century San Giovanni’s Church which was added to a monastery dating further back. Passing through an unassuming doorway, you find yourself in the modern foyer of a four-star boutique hotel named Sangiovanni that now occupies the carefully restored old friary.
The hotel has for its courtyard the quad from which the pious inhabitants of yesteryear were able to laze about under the watchful gaze of the town’s bell tower that was constructed in 1462 and, from the other corner, the church steeple that was built in 1376. The old refectory is a conference room and the funerary chapel, with arches covered with greenstone, is a museum.
Back along the Salita al Castello, three elderly ladies sat on the rimstone enjoying a chat in the last rays of the sun setting behind the Alps. Here and there the apartment balconies were decorated with bright flowers. In the distance glittered the steeple of the Santa Maria Assunta (Cathedral of the Assumption) that was built between 1491 and 1511.
A lane turning off to the right from the cobbled avenue led to the ultra-modern School of Music housed in yet another set of ancient buildings. A flight of stairs leading straight down linked the old nobility with the town where today still, in ways reminiscent of olden times, visitors can, in-between modern boutiques, browse among small workshops where craftsmen restore antiques, work wrought iron and design tapestries.
The cobble-stone Salita al Castello that linked the nobility up the hill with the townsfolk down below.
It is this sense of timelessness that lends Italy’s old cities their charm. It is also the wine and food that go with it, which in the case of Saluzzo is especially so as it falls inside the region where the Slow Food movement had its birth.
With fresh produce coming from the Po Valley, and with agriculture an economic mainstay of the region, buffet tables especially are a delight to behold. Breads, pastas, risottos, salamis and paper-thin slices of ham, decorated plates of steak tartare, cheeses and fruit, with bottles of wine placed in-between, are almost too beautifully set out to want to undo.
It says much about the devoutness of Saluzzo’s people through the ages that it has cloisters and churches representing virtually every era from nearly a thousand years ago.
It all fits so seamlessly together.