How Bracciano was built and evolved over time

Bracciano was built from the top down, starting with a tower.

The settlement is a product of incastellamento, the process that drew the population of Lazio into fortified hill centres between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. A tower was raised on the summit of the hill, datable to the twelfth century.

That tower was then absorbed. Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Prefetti di Vico built a rocca around it, and the fortress grew from there into what is now the Castello Orsini-Odescalchi — a particularly well-preserved medieval castle rather than a castle rebuilt into a Renaissance palace, which is what happened to most of its contemporaries.

The town assembled below and around it, in the pattern that fortified hilltop settlement produces: dense, stepped, turned inwards, with the castle commanding both the approach and the lake.

The ground itself is volcanic — relief and deposits of volcanic origin throughout the western Sabatine Hills — which supplied the building material as it did across this part of Lazio.

And the siting is the whole point: a dominating position over the lake, with Rome thirty kilometres away.