Malaspina Castle in Fosdinovo

The courtyard boasts an elegant Renaissance porch with stone columns, a well and a beautiful sixteenth-century marble portal leading to interior rooms of the castle, decorated and painted before 1800. Next is the entrance hall, the dining room with a large fireplace and seventeenth century ceramics, the throne room, the great hall and the room of ‘trabocchetto’ (the trap-door room) with a torture room lying below. It is said that the evil marchioness Cristina Pallavicini, used to kill her lovers by surprising them with a trap door located at the foot of the bed, dropping them into the dungeon or torture room. Trapdoors such as this were common in the castle. There were three of these traps, two in the veranda close to the garden and one in a corner-tower. Underneath them there were sharp knives with the blades pointing upwards, so sharp that when someone fell through a trapdoor they were dropped immediately to their death. In addition to these terrible instruments of torture and death, there was another even more terrible. It was a kind of iron arm that jutted from the wall of the tower with a pulley and a ring connected by a rope. The victim was tortured and then left to hang before the whole town until they were dead.

The oldest east tower, is known as the "Dante chamber” where, according to tradition, the great poet slept when he was a guest at the castle during his period of exile. The frescoes in the grand central hall depict the solid friendship between Dante and the Malaspina family.

 

The visit around the Castle continues upstairs among countless other furnished rooms and along the exterior walkway above the roof which offers a stunning panoramic view.