10 Castles In Italy Where Families Still Live Inside — Built Before 1500

Italy has by some counts around 25,000 castles, fortresses, watchtowers, fortified houses, clifftop strongholds, more than almost anywhere else on earth. And here is the part nobody quite sits with. Almost every single one of them is now something other than a home. A museum with a ticket desk and a cloakroom, a ruin behind a wire fence with a faded information board bleaching in the rain, a luxury hotel where the drawbridge leads to a spa, a property the state, the local council, or a heritage trust quietly took over the moment a family ran out of money to keep the roof on. Italy did something strange with its castles. It turned them into exhibits. We go to look at them the way we look at fossils. Beautiful, finished, behind glass, but not all of them. Because tonight, in a small number of these buildings, a child is doing homework under a ceiling that was painted before Columbus ever saw the Atlantic. Someone is turning a key in a lock their family first turned when knights still rode the roads outside. Someone is climbing a spiral staircase to a bedroom in a tower that is older than most of the countries on the modern map. These are not exhibits. These are addresses. People live here, right now, this morning, tonight. This is a countdown of 10 of them, ranked from remarkable to almost impossible to believe. And by the time we reach number one, the word old is going to stop being big enough. Before we start, three rules. Because Italian castle can mean a thousand different things and most of them don't count. Rule one, the structure had to be built before the year 1500, not restored to look medieval in the 1800s. Genuinely raised, in stone, while the middle ages were still happening. Rule two, it has to be privately owned, not by the state, not by a town hall, not by a national trust. Owned by a family, with a name, who could in theory sell it tomorrow and don't. Rule three, and this is the one that does the real cutting, a family has to actually live there. Not a foundation, not a hotel chain, not a curator who locks up at six and drives home. A family that sleeps inside the walls, thousands of castles in Italy, a few hundreds still in private hands, and only a handful where all three rules are true at once. These are 10 of them. We begin with the most famous and we climb toward the one almost nobody believes is still real. Entry 10, Castello Orsini Odescalci Bracciano, Lazio. We start with the one you have almost certainly already seen, even if you don't know its name. Lazio, the lakeside town of Bracciano, home to roughly 19,000 people, sitting on the rim of a volcanic crater lake, less than an hour northwest of Rome. The water below is the second largest lake in the region and the castle stands over the town like a clenched fist of pale stone. It was built between 1470 and 1485, started by Napoleone Orsini, finished by his son. The design is attributed to Francesco di Giorgio Martini, one of the great renaissance military architects, and the timing is staggering when you think about it. The masons were laying these five towers at almost the same moment the Sistine Chapel was going up in Rome. This is a building from the world of popes and condottieri of the Orsini and the Borgia, families who fought each other for the right to own this exact rock. The Orsini held it for centuries, then in 1696 with the family and financial collapse it was sold to Livio Odescalci, nephew of Pope Innocent XI, and here is the line that earns Bracciano its place. The Odescalci family still own it today. More than 300 years, one family, one castle. Now, full honesty, because this is the softer entry on the list. Most of Bracciano is now run as a museum and managed through the family's foundation, and more than 60,000 visitors walk its halls every year. It is not a quiet private house in the way the others on this list are, but the family never let go. They kept it through a French looting under Napoleon, through a forced sale and a buyback, through the entire collapse of the Italian aristocracy. They still maintain private rooms inside their own fortress. According to a story repeated for centuries, the Duchess Isabella de' Medici was murdered within these walls by her husband. Historians treat that as legend rather than established fact, and the room shown to visitors leans into the mystery. What is documented is far stranger to modern eyes. In 2006, the actor Tom Cruise married Katie Holmes inside this 15th century war castle. You have seen the photographs, you just didn't know you were looking at a home that has belonged to the same family since before the United States existed. Hold that thought, because from here, the castles get smaller, older, and far harder to explain. Entry 9, Castello di Tiene, Veneto. Veneto, the town of Tiene, with a population of around 24,000, about 20 kilometers north of Vicenza. And here is a building that quietly rewired the history of European architecture without ever firing a shot. The Castello di Tiene was built around 1450 and largely completed by 1476 in the late Gothic style, commissioned by the wealthy Porto family. Look at it, and your eye gets confused in the best way. It has the crenellations and corner towers of a castle, but it also has the tall windows, the airy loggia, the elegance of a Venetian palazzo. It is half fortress, half mansion, and that is precisely why it matters. This was built a full generation before Andrea Pagliardio, the architect whose villa designs would go on to shape country houses from England to the American south. And the Castello di Tiene is widely regarded as one of the most important forerunners of exactly that idea. A noble country residence that is about grace and farming and family life, not war. In a real sense you are looking at the ancestor of the Palladian villa. There is even a well in the courtyard attributed to Palladio himself. The castle passed by inheritance over the centuries, eventually reaching the family whose name the town itself carries. Today it remains a private residence, lovingly held by the counts of Tiene, who have made it their life's work to preserve and slowly open this enormous monument. And this is the proof it is a home, not a stage set. Inside hang portraits of the families who owned it, an unbroken gallery of faces from the 1500s to the 20th century, watching over rooms the family still uses. There are frescoes by 16th century Veneto painters, a collection of equestrian paintings, stables designed by a celebrated later architect. But the heart of it is simpler than any of that. It is somebody's house, and it has been somebody's house for over 500 years. Entry 8, Castello di Pralormo, Piedmont. Piedmont, the village of Pralormo, home to fewer than 2,000 people, about 30 kilometers from Turin, on the edge of the wine country of the Lange. The castle's first construction dates to the 13th century. It began life as a hard practical fortress, part of a chain of strongholds in a stretch of Piedmont, fought over between the powers of Asti and their rivals. There was a moat, there was a drawbridge, there was nothing romantic about it. It was a machine for surviving. Today it is the home of the Count Sperardo di Pralormo, a family that has lived here since the 17th century and never left. And what they have done with a 13th century war fortress is one of the most charming reinventions on this list. Every spring, the family turns the castle's English-style park into an ocean of flowers. The event is called Messa Tulipano, and according to the castle and the Grandi Giardini Italiani network, it brings tens of thousands of tulips and daffodils into bloom across the grounds, with figures sighted in the range of 75,000 to 90,000 bulbs. People follow the trail of tulips through the village to reach the gates. For a few weeks a medieval defensive structure becomes the most gentle place in Piedmont. And here is the detail that tells you a real family lives here, with real obsessions. On the upper floor, across three rooms, sits an elaborate antique miniature railway, built out of one Count's private passion. Trains running through painted landscapes and hand-cut tunnels. You can tour the cellars and the kitchens, and they are not reconstructions. They are the working bones of a house that is still run, still heated, still lived in. A fortress that learned over 800 years how to be a home. Gear shift. So far these have been famous, grand and frankly fairly comfortable places to be a nobleman. A renaissance war castle near Rome. The blueprint of the Palladian Villa. A fairy tale tulip park outside Turin. From here it changes. The buildings get older, the families get stranger, and the word ownership starts to feel too small for what is actually going on. Because the next castles aren't owned by their families. In a way that is hard to put into words, they are their families. Entry 7. Castello di Brolio, Tuscany. Tuscany. The commune of Gaiole in Chianti, with a population of under 3,000 at the last published census figures, on a hill above an endless rolling sea of vineyards, about 20 kilometers from Siena. The walls here go back to the 11th century. The fortress was destroyed and rebuilt more than once in the long brutal wars between Siena and Florence, and the structure was rebuilt around the year 1500 after one of those destructions. And through all of it, one fact never changed. The castle has belonged to the Ricassoli family since 1141. Let that land for a second. Since 1141. That is nearly nine centuries of one family on one hill. It is, by widely cited accounts, the oldest wine estate in Italy, and among the oldest family businesses anywhere in the world. The believe it detail at Brolio is not a ghost or a legend. It is a recipe. In 1872, Baron Bettino Ricassoli, a man who also served as prime minister of a newly unified Italy, worked out the formula for what would become Chianti, the blend of grapes that defined the region's wine. He did it here in correspondence with a professor in Pisa, and that formula shaped an entire industry. The current head of the family, Francesco Ricassoli, still runs the estate today. Now here is something to be precise about, because it matters. The castle you photograph today, with its dramatic battlements rising over the vines, owes much of its current look to a 19th century neo-gothic redesign by that same Baron Bettino. The medieval bones are real, and they are underneath. But the silhouette on the wine label is a romantic era vision of the middle ages, laid over genuinely ancient stone. You can visit the gardens, the chapel, the crypt where the family is buried, and taste the wine in the cellar. But the rest of the castle is closed to you, because the Baron and his family still live in it. They have lived on this exact hill since the world was a very different place, and they make their living, as they always have, from the grapes on the slopes below. Entry 6, Castello di Gropparello, Emilia-Romagna. Emilia-Romagna, the commune of Gropparello in the province of Piacenza, a community of a couple of thousand people, set on a rock that drops some 80 meters into a wooded gorge. The fortified site here is genuinely ancient. There has been a stronghold guarding this gorge, the gateway toward the old duchy of Piacenza, going back many centuries, with origins traced to the early medieval period. Its position made it almost unapproachable. You can still walk the patrol path around the walls and see exactly why no one wanted to attack it from below. Today it is the home of the Ghibelli family, and the most wonderful proof that this is a lived-in house and not a museum is also the most ordinary. The drawbridge is still the working entrance. To come home to Gropparello you cross a bridge that lifts, the way people have crossed it for as long as the castle has stood. And then there is the ghost. According to a long told local legend, in the 13th century a noblewoman named Rosania fell in love with a man who was not her husband. When the lord of the castle discovered it, the story goes, he had her walled up alive inside the stone. Local legend, repeated by the family and by visitors for generations, says that on windy nights you can still hear her. I want to be clear that this is folklore, not documented history. There is no record that establishes it as fact. But the family leans into it. Ghost hunters have come for decades and the tale has become part of the building's identity. What is not legend is the daily reality of it. The Ghibelli family hosts reenactments of medieval dinners in the very halls they live among. They raise their children in a building that has guarded this gorge since before the modern idea of Italy existed. They cross a drawbridge to get the shopping in. Entry 5, Castello di Scipione, Dei Marchesi, Palla Vicino, Emilia-Romagna. Emilia-Romagna again, a small medieval village a few kilometers from Salso Maggiore Terme, a spa town in the province of Parma with a population of around 20,000. The castle sits in the hills above the old salt springs that made this whole area worth fighting for. The first document recording this castle's existence dates to 1025 and it was founded by Adalberto Palla Vicino. That is the 11th century. That is older than the Norman conquest of England. And here is the part that turns it from impressive into astonishing. It is still inhabited by the direct descendants of that same family. The Palla Vicino are one of the very few families in all of Europe with more than a thousand years of documented history and Scipione is their oldest castle. In 1447 two Palla Vicino brothers rebuilt and modernized it, adding a round tower and reinforced sloping ramparts designed to deflect the new gunpowder cannon that were beginning to change warfare. So the building you see carries both its medieval origin and its 15th century upgrade against artillery, layered in the same stone. According to the family's own histories the founder Adalberto was celebrated in Renaissance verse, his name echoing in the great poems of the age. I'll flag that as the family's tradition rather than something I can hand you a footnote for on screen. What is grimmer and documented is the 20th century. During the Second World War the castle was used for a period as an internment site for prisoners before deportation. A dark chapter recorded in the castle's own published history. The believe it detail here is a small door. Inside what is known as the devil's room the castle's accounts describe a concealed doorway that opens onto a spiral staircase. An old escape route built into the walls and the proof it is a home is on the table. The family's monogrammed 19th century dinner service, silver and porcelain marked with the family crest, is still set out. A thousand years in the Pallavicino still lay the table in their own castle. Everything up to here has been genuinely remarkable. A family on the same hill since 1141. A bloodline a thousand years deep still setting the table in its own fortress. But the last four are different. The last four are the ones that make people in the comments argue about whether it can possibly be true. Because at this point the chain of continuity stops being long. It starts being almost unbroken and the buildings stop being merely old. Entry four Castello di Rivalta, Emilia-Romagna. Emilia-Romagna one more time because this corner of Italy quietly holds more living castles than almost anywhere else. The Borgo di Rivalta in the home to around 2,000 people on the banks of the Trebbia river. The castle is documented as far back as 1048. The powerful Landi family took control of it in the medieval period and it has been tied to that bloodline with only brief interruptions ever since. Today it has more than 50 rooms and it is the home of Count Orazio Zanardi Landi and his family. Now two details that sound invented and are not. According to the castle's own accounts its tower was the work of Pietro Antonio Solari the architect who would later go on to work on the walls and towers of the Moscow Kremlin. Solari's role at the Kremlin in the late 15th century is a matter of record. The attribution of Rivalta's tower to him is the castle's own claim so take it as that. But it is the kind of detail that makes you stop the video and check and the connection between a quiet castle on the Trebbia and the heart of Moscow is real enough to be remarkable. The second detail. The estate says that Princess Margaret of Britain spent her summers here over a period of years as a guest of the family. The castle has long welcomed European royalty and that is the family's account of it. I'll mark it as exactly that. A claim from the estate but it tells you the kind of house this is. And then there is the rule that gives the whole thing away. When you tour Rivalta you are told you cannot take photographs inside. Not because of some preservation technicality. Because it is a private home and people are living their lives in the rooms next door. There is a ghost story too. An old tale of a castle cook murdered in a crime of jealousy said to still wander the halls. That is local legend told for atmosphere not history. The history is simpler and stranger. A family has been here with only brief gaps for the better part of a thousand years and they would still rather you put your camera away. Entry three. Castel Coira, also called Cherbourg, South Tyrol. Now we go north high into the Alps to the German-speaking world of South Tyrol. The village of Schluderns, known in Italian as Sluderno, sits in the upper Val Venosta and at the last published census figures had fewer than 2,000 residents. Above it, over a slope of apple orchards, stands one of the best preserved castles in the entire Alpine region. Castel Coira, or Cherbourg, was first documented in 1259 and built around that time by the Prince-Bishops of Cher, whose name it carries. And here is the headline fact. The one that sets it apart from almost every castle on this or any list. It has belonged to the Counts of Trapp since 1504. More than 500 years one family and in all of its long violent history the castle was never destroyed, never burned to the ground in a siege, never gutted by fire. It simply survived century after century and was slowly transformed from a grim medieval fortress into an elegant renaissance home with painted arcades and a wood-panelled chamber holding a 16th century organ. Inside Cherbourg is something genuinely world famous. The castle holds the largest private armoury in the world. More than 50 complete suits of armour, swords, weapons, gathered by the families who owned the castle over the centuries. The centrepiece, according to the castle and its keepers, is a suit made around 1450 for a Count of the earlier ruling family, the Match. It stands over two metres tall and weighs around 45 kilograms. The man it was built for must have been a giant. But the detail I love most is the simplest. There is a flag on the tower and that flag is raised only when the Counts of Trapp are actually in residence. So you can stand in the orchards below, look up and know just by looking whether the family is home tonight. More often than not, in summer they are. A castle from 1259, never burned, never lost, with a flag that still tells the valley when its owners are upstairs. Entry two, Castello di Duino, Friuli Venezia Giulia. Friuli Venezia Giulia, the municipality of Duino Auricina near Trieste, home to around 8,000 people. And here the castle does not sit on a hill. It clings to a white limestone cliff, directly over the Gulf of Trieste, with the Adriatic crashing at its feet. The castle you see was built in the 14th century, around 1389, by the Wolsey family, raised on a promontory that had been a strategic lookout since Roman times. The ruins of an even older castle still stand nearby. Over the centuries it passed through marriage and inheritance until, in 1875, it came to the family that holds it still. The Della Torre Etaso, better known by the German form of their name, Thurn und Taxis. Today it remains a private residence of Prince Carlo Alessandro Della Torre Etaso, Duke of Castel Duino, who divides his time between here and France. Part of the castle and its gardens have been open to the public only since 2003. This is a place that history's most famous names came to as guests, and the most important of them for our story is the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In early 1912, staying at Duino as a guest of the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, Rilke began writing the Duino Elegies, considered among the greatest poems of the 20th century. He dedicated the finished work to her. The clifftop path below the castle is named the Rilke Trail to this day. That is not legend, it is one of the best documented facts in modern literary history. And then there is the legend, and I will mark it clearly as legend. The tale of the White Lady, the wife of a former Lord of Duino, said to have been thrown from the cliff and transformed into one of the pale rocks that still rises from the bay below. Folklore, atmosphere, not history. But you stand on that terrace with the wind off the Adriatic and the ruins of the older castle along the shore, and you understand why the family who lives here has never wanted to leave. The furniture is theirs, the photographs on the walls are of their own ancestors. It is a home that happens to be one of the most beautiful places on the Italian coast. We have one left, and it is the one I find almost impossible to believe. Entry 1 Castello di Strassoldo, Friuli Venezia Giulia. Friuli Venezia Giulia, in the flat green countryside of the lower Friulian plain, not far from the old Roman city of Aquileia. The Borgo of Strassoldo is a frazione of the town of Cerviniano del Friuli, which has a population of around 13,000, though the medieval hamlet itself holds only a few hundred souls. Spring water rises up through the ground here and runs in clear streams around the walls, which is why they call these the water castles. There are actually two of them, side by side, Strassoldo di Sopra and Strassoldo di Sotto, each grown around one of the original towers. The complex was built more than a thousand years ago, with records pointing to around 1035, raised around a tower core that reaches back, by some accounts, to the 6th century. It stood on the ancient Roman road that ran from Aquileia north toward what is now Austria, and here is the sentence the entire countdown has been climbing toward. The Castello di Strassoldo has been inhabited, without interruption, by the very same family that built it more than a thousand years ago, the Council of Strassoldo. It is described as one of the only castles in all of Europe still owned and lived in by its founding family. Think about what that actually means. Not a family that bought an old castle, not a family that returned to one after a gap. The same name, on the same door, on the same patch of ground for a thousand years. The bloodline that laid the first stone is the bloodline that locks up tonight. This family threaded its way through everything. According to records of the period, the castles were burned during the wars of the League of Cambrai in the early 16th century, and the family rebuilt. The Strassoldo gave generals and officials to the great empires of central Europe. The Austrian field marshal Radetzky married a countess of this family, and by long tradition the wedding took place in the village church, and through all of it the line never broke. The proof that this is a living home, not a relic, is almost unbearably domestic. Inside the upper castle there is a traditional Friulian kitchen with a hearth, a bread oven, a smokehouse for preserving food. There are ancestral portraits on the walls of people whose blood runs in the family that still walks past them every day. The furniture is old because it was never replaced, only inherited. Number one on this list is not the grandest castle in Italy. It is not the most photographed, or the tallest, or the richest. It is a low pair of water castles in a quiet Friulian village that most tourists drive straight past on their way to Venice. But it holds something no palace can buy, a thousand unbroken years of one family being home. And that, more than any tower or any treasure, is the rarest thing in this entire country. So let's go back to that number we started with, around 25,000 castles in Italy. And the strange truth this list reveals is that most of them did not fall to war, or fire, or invasion. They fell to something quieter. Italy, more than almost any nation, took its greatest castles into public hands. The most famous ones, the ones on the postcards, were absorbed by the state, by towns, by heritage organisations, and turned into the museums we visit and admire. Fame and emptiness went hand in hand. Very often the castle everybody has heard of is precisely the castle nobody lives in anymore. So how did these ten survive as homes? Not by luck. They survived through a peculiarly Italian machinery. For centuries the customs of the old nobility, including inheritance laws and entailed estates that forbade breaking a property up, meant a castle passed down whole to one heir instead of being carved into pieces and sold off. And in more recent times the framework Italy built around its historic houses, offering some relief in exchange for the obligation to preserve and to open them, gave families a fighting chance to hold on. The Ricassoli held Brolio for nearly nine centuries. The Pallavicino have a thousand years behind them at Scipione. The counts of Strasoldo never let go at all. But strip away the law and the economics, and what you are left with is a decision. Every one of these families could have sold. They could have taken the money, moved into a warm modern house with reliable heating and a roof that does not cost a fortune to mend, and let the state turn their home into another exhibit. They chose the cold tower instead. They chose the no photographs rule, the drawbridge you still have to cross, the flag that tells the valley you are home. They chose to treat the building not as an asset but as an identity and an obligation that will outlive them. Tonight somewhere in the Friulian plain there is a single light on in an upstairs window of a tower that is a thousand years old, and behind that window there is no guard, no curator, no ticket desk. Just a family. At home. Exactly as their family has always been. So I'll leave you with one question. Of all ten, which one would you actually want to wake up in tomorrow morning? The armoury in the Alps? The cliff above the Adriatic? Or the thousand year old water castle, where the name on the door has never once changed? Tell me down in the comments. And if this gave you a version of Italy you hadn't seen before, the one that lives behind the walls instead of in front of them, stick around. This is the kind of history we sit with here. The kind that takes longer than a postcard but means a great deal more.