In a certain region north of Tuscany, Italy, it would not seem out of place to spot fast Ferrari sports cars twisting through what looks like a Leonardo da Vinci-esque landscape.
Such colorful collages of scenery coexist in Emili-Romagna. Here in the Apennine mountains there are many juxtapositions of the old and new.
Another collage here involves an eclectic, medieval-looking pastiche of a building along the winding SP-62. It’s a fortress actually. And it has plenty of peculiarities housed within its walls—its founder was no less peculiar himself.
Rounding the shoulder of a mountain—presumably driving a Ferrari—about 45 minutes southwest of Bologna, you will spy looming upon the slope parapeted walls and turrets; there are towers capped with bulb roofs that look like great golden onions. This curiosity is the Rocchetta Mattei. And all is not quite as it seems here.
Rocchetta means “fortress” in Italian. Mattei denotes that character of a nobleman who built it, the Count Cesare Mattei, who laid the first stone with his own hands in 1850. His masterpiece was erected upon the ruins of a 13th-century medieval complex that was a real fortress once.
Of course, rustic Italy is a memory store for medieval castles—the Castello Storzesco in Milan and Castel Nuovo in Naples still stir feudal romances in visitors’ hearts. Yet Rocchetta Mattei is slightly off-kilter from the norm, diverging from other Italian fortresses both in form and function.
You can just imagine the count hunched in a tower like a mad scientist using electricity for some bizarre experiment. He supposedly picked the site of the ruins for his fortress because of the high iron content in the rocks. He believed the magnetic fields here were particularly conducive for treating his patients.
For the count, Rocchetta Mattei also became a fanciful haven from the political strife of the day. From as early as 1859, he moved in and, in eccentric fashion, led the life of a medieval lord. He formed his own medieval court, complete with its own buffoon.
Entering a peaked Moorish gateway, visitors would have reached a wide, bending stair leading to a vestibule dug out of the living rock. There are matching arched windows, mystical guardians, and carved female figures. From here, a Moorish “horseshoe” arch leads into a labyrinth of courtyards, staircases, and terraces.
Among the count’s fanciful rooms, the Chapel features rows of columns from which stacked double arches spring, lending light and air to the space—it is a reproduction of the prayer room in the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, in Spain.
From the Chapel, a staircase leads to the Hanging Garden with a view of parts of the castles and the majestic Apennine mountains that Da Vinci so admired. A further entrance leading to another stair is guarded by stone lions.
More of the fierce cats reappear in a scaled-down reproduction from the Alhambra, in Granada, Spain: the count’s Courtyard of the Lions is yet another nod to Moorish architecture. A central fountain with four lions is surrounded by a beautiful colonnaded porch, or loggia, with ornately decorated peaked arches that soar.
One moves through the maze: The count’s study, or the Red Room, features his collection of musical instruments. The Music Room attests to his family’s ear for music and his friendship with the great opera composer Gioachino Rossini. You can also visit the count’s monumental tomb. All the adornments are said to hold symbolic meaning.
The most quirky room of all, and most famous, would have to be the Room of Ninety, a ballroom designed in the modern Liberty style of the 1800s. This was where he planned to celebrate his 90th birthday in style, alongside 90 other nonagenarians. That is, had he lived on. The count died in 1896 at the age of 87.
After all these decades, it’s a wonder how count Mattei’s Neverland still fits so neatly into this timeless landscape; today, Bologna and the whole, bustling Emili-Romagna region are a thriving center for commerce—the home of Ferrari and Lamborghini carmakers—and a hotbed for tourism.
How has the fortress fared? It was handed down to his adopted son and later purchased to be made into a tourist attraction. Those plans fell by the wayside, though, and it was abandoned in the 1980s. For a time, Rocchetta Mattei fell into shambles.
But the population saw fit to rejuvenate the count’s beautiful Frankenstein of a castle. In 2005, the Foundation of Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna formally announced they had taken the reigns. It was reopened to the public in 2015.
The Foundation completed the “first stage of [a] thorough project” of revival, Rocchetta Mattei’s website writes. Now, they have “moved to the stages of stabilization, and faithful restoration which is still ongoing.”
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