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Castle of Rocca Calascio

Mountaintop fortress in Abruzzo, Italy

Field	Value
name	Castle of Rocca Calascio
native_name	Castello di Rocca Calascio
image	Rocca Calascio 06 2023.jpg
mapframe	yes
mapframe-zoom	12
mapframe-wikidata	yes
type	Fortress
coordinates
built	10th century
materials	stone and masonry
condition	Partially ruinous

| mapframe-zoom = 12 | mapframe-wikidata = yes The Castle of Rocca Calascio is a mountaintop fortress or rocca in the municipality of Calascio, in the Province of L'Aquila, Abruzzo, Italy.

At an elevation of around 1460 m, the castle is the highest fortress in the Apennines. Built of stone and masonry exclusively for military purposes and intended only to accommodate troops and never as a residence for nobles, the fortress overlooks the Plain of Navelli at one of the highest points in the ancient Barony of Carapelle.

Construction of the fortress started in the tenth century as a single watchtower. A walled courtyard with four cylindrical towers at the corners around a taller inner tower was added in the thirteenth century. The lower half of the fortress is built with distinctively larger stones than its upper half. It is believed that this feature was to make its base impenetrable to invaders. The fortress was never tested in battle. However, it was badly damaged in November 1461 by the 1461 L'Aquila earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7 to 8 on the Richter Scale. While the town of Calascio, which lies below the fortress, was rebuilt, the fortress was not.

The Castle of Rocca Calascio lies within the Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga National Park and alongside the high plain of Campo Imperatore.

It has also been added to the Windows Spotlight image collection for the lock screen of Windows PC's

Santa Maria della Pietà

Near the fortress, at a slightly lower elevation, is Santa Maria della Pietà, an octagonal church built in the seventeenth century.

In media

The Castle of Rocca Calascio was the location for several scenes in the Richard Donner film Ladyhawke. Sequences for The Name of the Rose and The American were also filmed here.

Gallery

File:Rocca Calascio 3.jpg|Castle of Rocca Calascio, the distinction is evident between larger stones for its lower half and smaller stones for the upper structure File:Chiesa di Santa Maria Della pietà 2017.jpg|Santa Maria della Pietà and the Castle of Rocca Calascio.

References

[http://www.seismosoc.org/publications/SRL/SRL_80/srl_80-6_hs/index.html Historical Seismologist, November/December 2009, L’Aquila (Central Italy) Earthquakes:The Predecessors of the April 6, 2009 Event, Andrea Tertulliani, Antonio Rossi, Luigi Cucci, and Maurizio Vecchi. Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Rome, Italy]
"Calascio Today by Silvio Germano, translation by Paul Zelus and Alex Frasco".
"Rocca Calascio". Regione Abruzzo.
Latini, Marialuce. (2000). "Guida ai Castelli d'Abruzzo". Carsa Edizioni.

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

10th-century-fortifications castles-in-abruzzo buildings-and-structures-in-calascio

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