Bella Italia 2018

We had an earlier start today as our destination, Rocchetta Mattei, located in the small town of Riola, was over 3 ½ hours by train from Venice. But this was a must see for me and I was hoping the trip would be worth it. We arrived in Riola to discover it was indeed a very small town and being a Sunday, there were no buses or taxis to take us to the castle. So we had a bit of a walk ahead of us. While it was a steep 25 minute walk, the view of the Italian countryside was breathtaking and I think the walk was worth it.

Rocchetta Mattei is a surreal fortress built by a mad inventor, sitting on an Italian hilltop in what feels like the middle of nowhere. Even from the outside, the looming fortress looks like a cobbled together hodge podge of architectural influences, and the interior is even crazier thanks to the castle’s more-than-a-little eccentric creator Cesare Mattei.

Since almost 1200 there has been a fortress sitting on the scenic hilltop in the Northern Apennines where the Rocchetta Mattei now stands. Construction of the current castle began in 1850 at the behest of Count Cesare Mattei, a slightly unhinged, self-taught medicine man and politician who is best known as the father of “electrohomeopathy”. He had developed his own system of healing that he said harnessed the life energy (electricity) of plants to heal all of Man’s ills, including cancer. Envisioning his castle as the home of his medical revolution, Mattei constructed the “Rocchetta,” as he called it, with the enthusiasm and focus of a child and he simply seemed to create the rooms as whims came to him.

The fusion of different architectural styles makes the Rocchetta a mesmeric and fantastic place, full of small rooms very expertly decorated and linked together by a labyrinthine plan mixed together with lodges, spiral staircases and towers. Quite a few of the rooms or spaces are reproductions of real places Mattei had visited. Il Cortile dei Leoni, The Lions’ Courtyard, is a reproduction of the courtyard of the Alhambra of Granada in Spain, and the chapel was built like the Cathedral of Cordoba, also in Spain. The attention to all the details is what makes this place so amazing and interesting. Mattei liked to play tricks on the eye with his designs, often building features from fake or disguised materials such as painted “stained glass”, fake marble arches, wooden steps and railings made from stone or cement. As the guide pointed out many of these tricks we were so impressed by the ingenuity of the designs.

Cesare Mattei led a bizarre life and gained worldwide fame due to his treatments. He never got married and adopted a young administrator, Mario Venturoli as his son who he later disinherited because he suspected his wife of trying to poison him. He spent his later years paranoid and isolated in one of the turrets with a draw bridge lifted, certain that everyone was trying to kill him. He passed away at the age of 87 and is interred onsite in a coffin decorated using decoupage in the black and white arched room.

After his death the castle changed hands a number of times and was even once donated to the City of Bologna who declined the bizarre gift. By the 1980s the castle was completely abandoned and falling into disrepair. However, an independent conservation group took control of the site in the 2000s and began repairing the site, opening some of it to the public.

Mattei’s electrohomeopathy is still practiced in some corners of the world such as India and Pakistan, but the true testament to Mattei’s genius/madness may be his beloved Rocchetta.

"There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds" G. K. Chesterton

I absolutely loved this place and the tour, and just wish we could have spent some free time exploring the rooms after the tour was over. The place was mesmerising, intriguing and left me wanting to know more. It was worth the train trip from Venice.Baca selengkapnya