Rocca di Castellina in Chianti historical timeline

It begins with a destruction. In 1397 Castellina was sacked and burned entirely by the troops of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, duke of Milan, commanded by Alberico da Barbiano and allied to Siena. The museum, writing from the fortress itself, puts it the other way round — the Sienese and their allies successfully besieging the enemy outpost — and both are the same event seen from two ends.

Florence rebuilt deliberately. In 1400 it was decided to fortify the place; the register of riformagioni in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze records in loco qui dicitur la Castellina fiat fortilitia. Work began in 1401, entrusted to the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore. It went slowly: in 1430 the Opera's workmen were charged with fortifying Castellina together with Staggia Senese and Rencine, and Filippo Brunelleschi was sent to specify the works and estimate the cost. Building ran on for some decades and probably finished around the middle of the century.

The first test was passed. In 1452 the new defensive system was besieged for 44 days and was not taken. Who was outside the walls is given three different ways by three sources — the Sienese, Aragonese troops, the Duke of Calabria — so this page records the siege and not the besieger.

The second was not. In 1478, during the second Aragonese invasion of the Chianti, Castellina fell to Sienese and Neapolitan troops. Giuliano da Sangallo directed the defence in person; Francesco di Giorgio Martini commanded the besiegers. The Sienese occupation lasted until 1483, when the Florentines took it back and held it until the unification of Italy.

Then the frontier stopped existing. The Lega del Chianti was abolished in 1774 by Pietro Leopoldo, though the new Comunità di Castellina was drawn to coincide almost exactly with the old terziere.

The twentieth century gave it the face it has. The comune acquired the rocca in the 1920s and Egisto Bellini restored it imitatively, adding the merlons, the wall-walk with corner bertesche, the bell-gable and the sala del capitano. It served as the municipio until 2006, when the Museo Archeologico del Chianti senese opened in it — a century, as the museum likes to note, after the excavation of the Montecalvario tumulus.

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