At the highest point of the old town stands the castle that was, until 1806, the seat of the feudal lords of Bollita. The name attached to it belongs to one of them, Diego Sandoval de Castro — not a medieval warlord but a Renaissance poet, and one half of the most famous double killing in the literary history of Basilicata.
At a glance
- Type
- Baronial castle; largely divided into private dwellings
- Where
- Historic centre of Nova Siri, Province of Matera, Basilicata
- Coordinates
- 40.1498° N, 16.5419° E
- Feudal seat
- until 1806 — De Castro, Asprella, Raimondi, Crivelli
- Named for
- Diego Sandoval de Castro, poet and baron of Bollita, 1516–1546
- Plan
- Triangular, around a wide inner court
Overview
Nova Siri is a hill town in the province of Matera, set back from the Ionian shore, with a modern seaside settlement, Nova Siri Scalo, grown up separately on the coast. The castle occupies the top of the old town, and the square of the historic centre is effectively enclosed by it. Around it run the lanes of the Porticella quarter, with their lamie — interlaced arches carrying cross vaults.
The town was not called Nova Siri until March 1872. Its name was Bollita; the council asked for the change to recall that the territory had belonged, in the age of Magna Graecia, to the Siritide, the region whose ancient capital was Siris. The new name is a nineteenth-century act of memory and not a statement of position: the Greek colony of Siris did not stand here, and any account that places the castle beside it has read the name for a map.
History
The castle was the seat of the feudal lords of Bollita until 1806, when feudalism was abolished in the Kingdom of Naples. The families that held it are recorded as the De Castro, the Asprella, the Raimondi and the Crivelli.
On the date of building the sources disagree sharply, and none supports the fifteenth century. The Cultural Heritage Online archive entry puts the origin around the ninth century; local sources give roughly 1100. Both are far from the account that circulated in the English version of this entry, which described a fifteenth-century Aragonese fortification. That account was mistaken in its foundation as well as its date, and it is worth being explicit about why.
Diego Sandoval de Castro was not a fifteenth-century Aragonese lord. He was born in Calabria in 1516 and died at Noepoli in 1546: a poet, castellan of Cosenza and baron of Bollita, the son of the Iberian nobleman don Pedro, and a figure of Renaissance letters with connections between Rome and Florence. In March 1542 he published a collection of his Petrarchan verse. He was married, by proxy, to the Neapolitan noblewoman Antonia Caracciolo; and he exchanged poems and letters with Isabella Morra, baroness of Favale, the town now called Valsinni, a few hills away. The correspondence passed through Isabella’s tutor and was addressed, for form’s sake, to Sandoval’s wife. Only his letters survive; hers do not. In 1546 Isabella Morra’s brothers killed her, and then killed him. She is now read as one of the strongest poetic voices of the Italian Cinquecento, and recent scholarship has been at work restoring him from a stock villain to a poet in his own right.
What you see
A massive block rather than a fortress in the picturesque sense, set on natural rock at the top of the town, on a triangular plan around a wide inner court. The front presents a high wall pierced with loopholes, and the entrance is a broad hall with no portal to it.
Most of the building is now lived in. It has been divided into private dwellings, and the conversion has changed the original character of the entrance hall; what survives of the old fabric most visibly is the eighteenth-century wrought-iron balconies. The archive entry also states that the castle is open to be visited, which does not sit easily with private occupation, and no confirmation of regular opening has been found: treat the exterior as what there is to see, and ask locally before expecting more.
360° photos
Drag inside the frame to look around from this point.
Cultural significance
The interest of the place is not military. It is that a small baronial house on a hill in Basilicata was, in the 1540s, one end of a correspondence in verse that ended in two murders, and that the episode has shaped how the region reads its own Renaissance ever since. Nova Siri and Valsinni both live with it; the castle is where the man’s half of the story was based.
Practical information
- The historic centre is walked. The castle stands at its highest point, with the Porticella quarter and its lamie immediately around it.
- The building is largely in private hands: there is no ticket office and no regular opening. What can be seen from the street is the outside.
- Valsinni, where Isabella Morra lived and died, is a short drive inland and keeps its own castle and a literary park in her name.
Getting there
Nova Siri Centro sits inland above the coast; Nova Siri Scalo, on the Ionian shore, has the station on the Taranto–Reggio Calabria line and is linked to the hill town by local road. By car the SS106 Ionica runs along the coast below.
Sources
- APT Basilicata and the Comune di Nova Siri — on the town, the castle and the change of name in 1872
- Agenzia Giornalistica Regione Basilicata — on Diego Sandoval de Castro and current scholarship
- Dizionario degli autori italiani — biography of Diego Sandoval de Castro
- Cultural Heritage Online historical archive — original Italian entry on beniculturalionline.it, verified and rewritten in August 2026.
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