Caetani Castle site features

The Castello Caetani stands on the walled hill town of Sermoneta, and it was built as a fortress rather than a residence -- a thirteenth-century castle with keep and bastions, its outer walls over three metres thick, the whole protected by a circuit of walls resting directly on living rock.

The keep

The core is the maschio, which held the lord's bedchambers and served as the last refuge if the place were overrun. Its structure is completely independent of the rest of the castle and was connected to the adjoining buildings only by two wooden drawbridges that could be raised at need; staff and servants were to shelter inside it if the whole complex fell into enemy hands. Beside it stands a second, much smaller tower called the maschietto. Outside both is the great parade ground, the piazza d'armi.

The rooms

The Caetani partly demolished some of the castle's buildings to make the Sala dei Baroni, which the Borgia then altered in the fifteenth century, and the rooms known as the Camere Pinte, restored in the late 1990s. The Camere Pinte are three guest rooms, two of them frescoed by an unknown hand attributed to the school of Pinturicchio, with mythological figures and the theological virtues.

One room keeps a different kind of record: the inscriptions left by distinguished visitors, still preserved on a wall.

The maschio

The keep, holding the lord's bedchambers and designed as the final refuge. Structurally independent of everything around it and joined to the adjacent buildings only by two wooden drawbridges that could be raised -- so the castle could lose its outer works and the tower would still be a sealed problem for an attacker.

The maschietto

The much smaller counter-tower beside the keep. With the maschio it is all that survives of the original Annibaldi building of the early thirteenth century.

The five circuits of walls

Added by the Caetani after 1297, along with new buildings, and worked with a system of drawbridges that made it possible to isolate the tower in an attack.

The Camere Pinte

Three guest rooms restored at the end of the 1990s, two of them frescoed by an unknown painter attributed to the school of Pinturicchio, with mythological figures and the theological virtues.

The Sala dei Baroni

Made by the Caetani out of partly demolished earlier buildings, and modified by the Borgia in the 15th century -- the room where the two families' tenure is legible in the same walls.

The visitors' inscriptions

A room in the complex held the inscriptions of every visitor of standing, and they are still preserved on a wall. Frederick II came, Charles V in 1536, Lucrezia Borgia stayed for periods, and the popes Gregory XIII in 1576 and Sixtus V.

Borgia Cittadella and the Casa del Cardinale

Added under Alexander VI by Antonio da Sangallo, as part of the fortification works the Borgia carried out once they had taken the castle from the Caetani.