A fortified settlement has occupied this rocky spur above the Turano since the 11th century, when the area took its name from Sinibaldo Sinibaldi, a local feudatory whose family was later succeeded by the Mareri counts of the Sabina. The medieval rocca controlled the eastern approach to Rieti and the lower Turano valley, a strategic corridor between the Lazio interior and the Abruzzo highlands. By the early 16th century the property had passed to the Cesarini, one of the major Roman baronial houses, who would commission the transformation that defines the castle today.

From 1530 Cardinal Alessandro Cesarini engaged Baldassarre Peruzzi, the Sienese architect then working at the Fabbrica di San Pietro, to reshape the medieval fortress into a Renaissance fortified residence. Peruzzi designed an irregular pentagonal complex articulated on a forward spur and a rear keep, exploiting the contours of the cliff over the Turano. Three project drawings preserved at the Uffizi document the plan, which contemporaries read as an eagle with outstretched wings — a zoomorphic conceit linked to the imperial eagle that Charles V had added to the Cesarini coat of arms. The interior is organised around a great court, noble rooms, underground service spaces and gardens, and was decorated with fresco cycles by Lazio Mannerist workshops over the following decades.

Through the 17th and 18th centuries the castle changed hands repeatedly, passing among the Mattei, the Lante della Rovere, the Muti-Bussi and the Lepri families. In the 1950s the American writer and publisher Caresse Crosby acquired the property and used it as an artistic salon hosting writers and painters. Declared a national monument in 1928, the castle was restored and reopened to the public in April 2014 under private cultural management; today the great court, the noble apartments, the underground rooms and the gardens are open year-round, and the castle hosts exhibitions, school and university programmes and an artist-residency strand alongside guided and private visits.