Castello Scaligero di Soave Site Features

The castle is built up the hill in three successive courtyards, each higher and more defensible than the last, ending at the keep on the summit.

The masonry is brick and local stone, with Ghibelline swallowtail merlons -- the Scaligeri, like the Visconti, were of the imperial party, and the merlon shape declares it.

The first courtyard is the largest and was where the garrison and its horses were kept. The second is smaller and tighter. The third gives onto the keep, which is the oldest fabric on the site.

Two arms of the town wall run down the hillside from the castle to enclose Soave below, making castle and town a single continuous fortification -- the feature that distinguishes this from an ordinary hill castle.

The nineteenth-century restoration added roofs, timber floors, staircases and furnishings. It is well done and clearly of its period; the walls beneath it are the fourteenth-century work.

The three courtyards

The sequence is the point: each courtyard could be held after the one below it fell, and walking up through them makes the defensive logic obvious in a way a plan does not.

The keep

The tower at the summit is the oldest part of the castle and gives the view over the whole Classico vineyard zone.

The restored interiors

Furnished rooms from Camuzzoni's restoration, including a hall with period furniture and armour -- nineteenth-century in conception, and interesting as that.

The view

The whole town inside its walls below, and behind it the volcanic hills planted with Garganega. This is the clearest possible explanation of how the place works.

The castle occupies an isolated hill at the point where the Verona plain meets the first slopes of the Lessini. It is the only high ground for some distance, which is why it was fortified.

Below it to the south and west the plain runs flat toward Verona; behind it to the north and east rise the volcanic hills of the Soave Classico zone, terraced and planted almost entirely with vines.

The hill itself is limestone and scrub, with olives and cypresses on the lower slopes -- a Mediterranean edge to a landscape that is otherwise continental.