Catch Me if You Can!

At the Foot of the Walls

Pretend that you are the captain of an army that wants to assault the castle. After a long climb, you are finally right at the foot of the walls. Before you are three perimeter walls and three mighty bastions with embrasures, openings from which menacing cannons emerge, trained on you and your men.

To understand how a castle soldier felt, you can still walk along the long perimeter wall that offers a wide view of the Adige Valley and the Rio Cavallo Valley (Rosspach, in the Cimbrian language). From up here, you have a perfect view of the battlefield and positions from which to hurl arrows, stones, bullets and boiling liquids at enemies who dare to approach.

Seven gates to pass through

Your assault on the castle continues. After surviving cannon fire, arrows, and stones hurled from the walls, you would find yourself facing the first of seven gates to pass through.

Already at the first gate you would have had to deal with the first guardhouse. Today the old guards’ room, where we till can see the old fireplace that warmed the men-at-arms, houses the ticket office.

Once past this gate and the soldiers defending it, you would be ready to face a second gate, before finding yourself in front of the one known as “the dark door”, designed according to the principles set out by Leonardo da Vinci in one of his treatises. It led to a dimly lit, uphill tunnel, with a bend that prevented you from seeing the exit.

To exit the tunnel you would have had to pass through two more gates fitted with an iron shutter closure. While attempting to force them open, you would have to deal with the defenders, who would continue to attack you from walls and slits. You would have found yourself in the dark and under enemy fire. A nightmare.

As if that were not enough, next to the last of these gates there was another guardhouse, full of well-rested soldiers ready to engage in hand-to-hand combat. Even today, on the low wall in front of the guards’ cabin, carved in stone, you can see a map for playing Nine Men’s Morris, the soldiers’ only entertainment in peacetime.

Take the field!

If you thought that by passing through this deadly tunnel you would finally reach the heart of the castle, you were wrong! There are still a fifth, sixth and seventh gate to pass through before reaching the Count’s palace, where the residence of the Trapp counts, lords of the castle from the 15th to the 20th century, was located.

As if that weren’t enough, between one perimeter wall and the other (in Castel Beseno there are three), you had to deal with soldiers who “took the field” or, as Italians would say “scendevano in lizza”, to face you with sword and mace in hand. In Italian lizza refers to the space between two walls, used to create an area to trap the enemy who had overcome the first line of defense.

As you can imagine, very few would have reached the heart of Castel Beseno alive!

A self-sufficient castle

The only way to conquer this fortress, therefore, was to starve it out, besieging it for months and months in the hope that the exhausted adversary  would raise the white flag.

Castel Beseno, however, was also prepared for this eventuality. In addition to having large ovens for baking bread and cellars for keeping wine and other foods cool, it also had a well with a deep cistern underneath that collected rainwater, necessary to sustain the castle in the event of a siege.

So, with rain, the castle could have resisted  for months while mowing down enemies with projectiles launched from the walls, or counting on the help of allied armies to come to the rescue.

Honor to the vanquished

This is more or less what happened in the famous Battle of Calliano (1487), perhaps the most famous occurrence in the history of the castle.

After conquering the city of Rovereto, the army of the Republic of Venice, led by condottiero (mercenary captain) Roberto Sanseverino d’Aragona, set out to head north to take the city of Trento as well. The only strongholds that stood in the way of the plan were Castel Pietra and Castel Beseno.

Sanseverino had his men build a pontoon bridge to cross the Adige River and then attack and besiege Castel Beseno with a large and battle-hardened army. A signal was immediately sent from the castle to inform the commander of the Tyrolean troops stationed in Trento and ask for help.

The Tyroleans were inferior in number to the Venetians, but their soldiers had firearms, a novelty for the time. When they arrived on the battlefield, the din of gunfire, the smoke and the fire of the arquebuses caused panic in the Venetian army, which retreated hastily.

Many threw themselves onto the retreating pontoon bridge until it gave way, drowning hundreds of soldiers. The captain Roberto Sanseverino d’Aragona remained on the shore to fight to the death, with a handful of loyalists by his side.

The people of Trento, recognising his valour, buried his body in the Cathedral of Trento, having a large tombstone erected for him showing the leader with his face uncovered and the flag of the Republic of Venice lowered. The tombstone was made of red Trento marble, a precious material reserved only for monuments to illustrious figures.

Even today, if you visit Castel Beseno there is a room dedicated to the Battle of Calliano and to the fate of this condottiero. It reminds us of the power of this unassailable fortress, which not even the most valiant captain managed to conquer.