Standing on the waterfront facing the Bay of Naples, Castel Nuovo is the great seafront fortress of the city, founded in 1279 by the Angevin king Charles I after he moved his capital to Naples and needed a defensive seat near the harbour. The thickset, five-towered castle has dominated the western edge of the centre for more than seven centuries. The most striking feature of the building is the white marble triumphal arch set between two of the great trachyte stone towers at the entrance. Commissioned in the mid fifteenth century by Alfonso V of Aragon to celebrate his conquest of Naples, the arch is one of the finest works of Italian early Renaissance sculpture, with reliefs by Francesco Laurana and others depicting the triumph of the new king. Inside the castle the great Sala dei Baroni, an immense hall with a star-vaulted ceiling that rises more than twenty-eight metres above the floor, was named for the conspiracy of the barons, a 1485 plot against the Aragonese king Ferdinand I whose ringleaders he is said to have lured to a banquet in this very room and arrested. The hall is now used by the Naples city council. The castle houses the Civic Museum of Naples, with collections covering the history of the city from the Middle Ages to the present, including paintings, sculptures and decorative arts, with strengths in Neapolitan painting from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. A small chapel preserves frescoes by Giotto and Maso di Banco, though most of these have been damaged or lost. Beneath the central courtyard, a curious detail. Renaissance and later builders preserved a small underground area where, during work in the nineteenth century, the bones of murdered conspirators are said to have been discovered, an echo of the dark history of the building. Set within easy walking distance of the central railway station, Piazza del Plebiscito and the busy passenger ports for the boats to Capri and Ischia, the castle is a natural starting point for any tour of the historic centre, with its grim curtain walls and graceful Renaissance arch summing up the layered character of medieval and Renaissance Naples in a single building.

Type: Tourist Attraction

Address: Via Vittorio Emanuele III, Naples, Italy

Opening Date: 01/01/1282