Ventimiglia Tower in Montelepre
The Ventimiglia Tower in Montelepre, also known as Ventimiglia Castle, is a monumental building from the Norman era.
The tower stands on the top of a hill overlooking the surrounding valleys and represented the only fortified site along the most important road axis in Western Sicily: the ancient road that connected Palermo to Trapani.
It was built starting in 1433 at the behest of Giovanni Ventimiglia and became a symbol of the sovereignty of the church of Monreale over the newly acquired fiefdom. The construction gave a strong boost to the local economy linked to Giovanni Ventimiglia's olive grove and led to the birth of a small inhabited center prior to the great modern feudal colonization. A fact demonstrated by the scattered presence of single-cell houses, made of poor material, around the tower, unlike the remaining part of the town which instead presents an orthogonal layout typical of the new foundations.
The castle of Montelepre presents itself as an imposing parallelbiped with a rectangular plan with a crenellated terrace.
The façade is made of shapeless stones except in the corners and near the windows which are instead delimited by squared stones. A door protected by both a bartesque and a drawbridge, of which the cracks for the passage of the lever arm remain, allowed access to the first floor of the tower. Some niches, two mullioned windows and one three-lancet window, open onto the main façade. The ground floor instead takes light from splayed slits. The small balcony, the sundial placed on the terrace and the side entrance tower are modifications carried out in recent times.
The interior is divided into three floors: the ground floor has four rooms located on two different levels, covered by a vault barrel; the first floor was originally made up of two rectangular halls covered with three cross vaults divided by a rib; the second floor was also divided into two rectangular halls with the difference, compared to the first floor, that the eastern side was occupied by three rooms of different sizes, the central one of which was used as a chapel. Of the original cross roof, only the stone corbels remain.
Inside the tower is housed the Civical Museum of Montelepre.
