Visconti Castle: tickets, opening hours and tips

The Visconti Castle is the great brick palace that Galeazzo II Visconti had built in 1360 on the north side of Pavia's old town: a square 150 metres a side, with towers at the corners and a deep moat. More the seat of a refined court than a fortress, today it houses the Civic Museums.

Outside, the three surviving façades have a sloping base, battlements on granite corbels and elegant pointed mullioned windows, more palace than barracks. Above the south entrance, facing the town, a slab carved in the 14th century shows the Annunciation.

Inside opens the square courtyard, ringed by a portico of pointed arches on mighty stone columns; under the vaults you can still see traces of the 1366 decoration, with “compass” patterns and a “starry sky”. On the first floor runs the loggia, which on the south side has large four-light windows with trefoil arches and pierced rose windows.

The rooms hold precious frescoes. The Blue Room, in the south-west tower, is covered in frames, coats of arms and stars in gilded relief on blue and green grounds. In the chapel, to the right of the south entrance, are 14th-century paintings by Andrea de' Bartoli of Bologna.

On the first floor, in the Room of the Damsels, two life-size ladies pose in front of a rose hedge: they date from 1393 and are attributed to Gentile da Fabriano, who was working in Pavia in those years.

In 1368, at the wedding of Violante Visconti and Lionel of Clarence, son of the King of England, Geoffrey Chaucer was among the guests. In the south-west tower the dukes kept a library of more than a thousand illuminated manuscripts: in 1500 Louis XII took it to France, and about 400 volumes are still in Paris.

To the north stretched the Visconti park, a walled hunting reserve reaching all the way to the Certosa, with thousands of red deer, fallow deer and roe deer and a menagerie of leopards, ostriches and parrots. The Battle of Pavia was fought there in 1525.

In 1527 French artillery destroyed the castle's north side, now closed off by a stretch of the Spanish walls. Centuries followed as barracks, cannon foundry and arsenal, which wiped out most of the paintings. The castle passed to the city and was restored in the 1920s and 1930s; in summer the courtyard hosts concerts.

Don't miss
• The courtyard and the loggia.
• The Blue Room.
• The damsels against the roses.
• The chapel.

Did you know?
• In 1400 the castle welcomed the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos, who gave Gian Galeazzo Visconti two thorns from Christ's crown, now in Pavia Cathedral.
• The humanist Pier Candido Decembrio called it a “residence without equal in Italy”.