Corradino Castle in Centuripe
The Corradino Castle in Centuripe is one of the monumental public buildings of the imperial era located along the ancient Via Giulio Cesare.
Among the other monumental buildings in Centuripe, called Augustali di Centuripe , there are also the Dogana, the Temple of the Augustali and Terme Bagni.
The Corradino Castle is a Roman funerary building from the imperial age , one of the most important funerary monuments of the Middle Empire in Sicily. The funerary building had the shape of a small temple on a podium with the entrance facing Mount Etna. What is visible today are the walls of the long sides of the podium and the foundations of the structure. The interior of the podium was to be divided into two rooms; one intended for the sepulchral chamber, which originally had to have a vault, the other which constituted a pre-chamber.
It was the archaeologist Guido Libertini in his monograph on Centuripe of 1926 who was the first to identify the intended use . Its appearance is reminiscent of a tower, the building in fact has a square plan preceded by a pronaos. Its denomination of Castello is due to the fact that in the thirteenth century it was used by Corrado Capece as a fortress in the defense of the Swabians in Sicily.
The place where the Castle stands is particularly suggestive, a hill from which one can enjoy an extraordinary panorama.
