Castel Grande

Bellinzona is the gateway to the Alps, the point at which the flat, Italian-speaking Ticino opens into the mountain passes that controlled access to Switzerland from the south for 2,000 years. Three medieval castles guard this gateway, placed on rocky spurs above the town with overlapping fields of fire, connected by walls that once ran from hillside to hillside and blocked the valley entirely. The Roman legions fortified this site; the medieval bishops of Milan fortified it again; the Swiss Confederation captured it in 1503 and have held it ever since. In 2000, UNESCO designated all three castles a World Heritage Site. Castel Grande is the largest, the oldest continuously occupied, and the most dramatically positioned.

The rock on which Castel Grande stands has been fortified since at least the late Roman period, the 4th or 5th century AD. A Roman-era inscription found on the site records military occupation. The medieval castle was built over and around earlier structures: the two towers, Torre Bianca and Torre Nera, the White Tower and the Black Tower, date from the 13th and 14th centuries, when the Visconti lords of Milan were competing with the Uri confederation for control of the Alpine passes. The walls connecting the castle to the town below, known as the murata, or great wall, were built in the 14th and 15th centuries by the Visconti and their successors to block the valley floor completely.

From the 14th century to 1503, Bellinzona and its castles changed hands repeatedly between the Milanese Duchy, ruled first by the Visconti and then the Sforza, and the Swiss Confederation. The Swiss cantons, principally Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, repeatedly attempted to capture the passes; the Milanese repeatedly recaptured them. In 1503, the Swiss Confederation captured Bellinzona definitively, and it has been Swiss territory ever since, the southernmost point of the Confederation, where German-speaking Switzerland meets the Italian-speaking Ticino. The transition from Milanese military engineering to Swiss governance produced no architectural upheaval: the castles simply continued in use as administrative and military centres.

Torre Bianca and Torre Nera are the dominant architectural features of Castel Grande. The White Tower is the taller, at 27 metres; the Black Tower is the older. The distinction between them, based originally on the colour of their stone facing though both appear similarly grey today, was already conventional by the 14th century. Both are accessible by stairs, and the view from the top of Torre Bianca looks directly down onto the rooftops of Bellinzona, across the Ticino river valley, and up toward the Gotthard pass.

A remarkable feature of the current visitor access to Castel Grande is the underground passage carved through the rock in 1988 by the cantonal government, connecting the Bellinzona city centre to the castle via a lift that rises through the living rock. The passage was designed by architect Aurelio Galfetti and is itself considered an architectural achievement: a contemporary intervention in a medieval site that neither imitates the medieval fabric nor ignores it. The castle museum at the base of the towers contains archaeological material from the site's long occupation and contextualises all three Bellinzona castles.

The UNESCO World Heritage designation of 2000 covers all three castles and the connecting walls as 'an outstanding example of late medieval military architecture.' The designation recognised the completeness of the ensemble, three castles, the walls between them, and the town below, as a unified historical monument rather than three separate sites. The management plan requires that all three castles be maintained in their current condition, funded by the Ticino cantonal government. A combined ticket is available for all three castles and is the recommended approach.