Castel Sant'Elmo dominates the city of Naples from the highest point of the Vomero hill, located in Largo San Martino, from which you can enjoy a sple ... More
Castel Sant'Elmo dominates the city of Naples from the highest point of the Vomero hill, located in Largo San Martino, from which you can enjoy a splendid view of the historic center.
It is a medieval castle built around the 1300 in the same place where, in the tenth century, there was a chapel dedicated to Sant'Erasmo, from which Eramo, Ermo and then Elmo, which gave the present name of the fortress. Originally it was a Norman observation tower (called Belforte), and it was Roberto d'Angiò who commissioned the architect Tino da Camaino in 1325 to construct the Palatium castrum, whose works ended in 1343 under the reign of Giovanna I d 'Anjou.
Since then the Castle was besieged several times for its strategic position and control on the streets of Naples, and was a military target especially during the dispute between Spaniards and French for the conquest of the Kingdom of Naples. Between 1537 and 1547 Castel Sant'Ermo, later called Sant'Elmo, was rebuilt by commission of the Spanish Viceroy Don Pedro De Toledo and assumed the current six-pointed star plan.
In the 1587 a lightning struck the castle destroying the castles and military houses and the internal church. The building was then rebuilt between the 1599 and the 1610 by the architect Domenico Fontana.
Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the castle became a prison, where the philosopher Tommaso Campanella was also a prisoner, and was the seat of revolutionary movements in the 1799, when it was taken by the people and besieged by the Republicans who proclaimed the Neapolitan Republic in the Piazza d'Armi. Castel Sant'Elmo, after the collapse of the republic, was still a prison, where Giustino Fortunato, Domenico Cirillo and Luisa Sanfelice were imprisoned, and remained a military prison until the 1952.
Only in the twentieth century 80 Castel Sant'Elmo became a structure of cultural and museum interest and from the 1982 the entire monumental complex was entrusted to the custody of the Superintendence for Artistic and Historical Heritage of Naples, open to the public in the 1988.
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