How Castel Gandolfo was built and evolved over time

Castel Gandolfo was built upwards from a castle and outwards from a court.

The core is the twelfth-century fortification of the Gandolfi family, which gave the town its name. It passed to the Savelli and was bought by the Apostolic Camera in 1596, and it was Urban VIII who rebuilt the old castle into something a pope could live in, making it an official papal residence in 1626.

Everything else followed the court. From the seventeenth century onwards the shores of Lake Albano filled with summer residences, villas and cottages belonging to the Roman aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie, who came up after the papal household.

The one great set piece is Bernini's. The parish church of San Tommaso da Villanova was designed by him between 1658 and 1661 for the Chigi pope Alexander VII, on a square Greek-cross plan, and holds a Crucifixion by Pietro da Cortona.

The oldest engineering on the site is Roman and underground. The emissario of Lake Albano is an artificial outlet cut in antiquity — tradition, reported by Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, puts it in the third century BC. It starts from the rock below the Villino Manes at about 250 metres and runs 1,800 metres south-south-west to the locality of Mole.

The modern addition is sporting: the Stadio Olimpico on the lake, built for the rowing events of the 1960 Rome Olympics.