Half neoclassical palace and half medieval castle.
The Caldoresco Castle, the main monument of the city, presents two contrasting natures. It stands out as a medieval fortress, complete with a moat and a drawbridge when observed from Piazza Barbacani, while it appears as a neoclassical palace, Palazzo Palmieri, when viewed from Piazza Rossetti.
The castle, in its composite and eclectic forms, is actually a compendium of the city’s history, and by observing it closely, one can read the events of two thousand years of history summarized in its walls.
If one could access its cellars, in the part transformed into a palace, Roman walls would be discovered. These are the walls of the amphitheater of ancient Histonium, on whose ruins the Franks had probably built the first castle after the conquest of the village in 802 and the foundation of Vasto d’Aymone.
When Giacomo Caldora, a powerful condottiero, received the city of Vasto in fief in 1422, he decided to adapt the castle to the defensive needs imposed by the advent of firearms. For this reason, in 1427, he began the works, probably entrusted to the military engineer Mariano di Jacopo da Siena, known as Taccola. He expanded the castle according to a model called “bastioned enclosure,” with three robust “almond-shaped” bastions designed to deflect artillery shots and a fourth circular bastion against which the “castle” door was placed at the point where one passes from Piazza Rossetti to Piazza Diomede.
The castle we see today from Piazza Barbacani is, therefore, the one from 1427, deprived of the two towers inside the walls that originally were part of it and that should have originally given the castle a similar appearance to the one always built by Caldora in Pacentro. The towers that peek out from the walls today, the one topped by the octagonal lantern and the cylindrical one with the Guelph merlon, were added by Marquis Cesare Michelangelo d’Avalos, who repurchased the castle from the Municipality in 1701 and restored it, after it had been used as a court and prison.
After the Napoleonic period, the castle was purchased by Salvatore Palmieri, who entrusted the construction of the palace seen today from Piazza Rossetti to the city’s chief architect, Pietrocola. Several subsequent interventions followed the original one by Pietrocola, which marred the North side with a series of shops built against the outer wall, fortunately demolished in 1960, the year in which at least the medieval facade of the castle was restored to its original forms.
