History

There is little reliable information, gaps spanning centuries, dubious authors, confused ownership that often does not coincide with actual possession, and family names that intertwine and alternate while the castle, marquisate, and principality often remain in the same hands. This apparent disorder blurs a relative continuity unfolding from one century into the next, right up to the present day.

The castle was built as a military fortress. It owes its name to Sinibaldo, count and rector of Sabina between 1058 and 1065. Little is known about the castle’s history in the following centuries. It belonged to the Benedictine monks of Farfa and was dispersed with the dilapidation of the Abbey’s assets. Between the 13th and 15th centuries, it was embedded in the fiefdoms of two families due to disappear — the Buzzi and Brancaleone di Romancia —, as recorded in the Statutes of Tivoli and in the Archives of the Cathedral of Rieti. During those centuries, the medieval structure of the castle as a fortress became established.

Only in the 16th century did more precise information become available. The Mareri counts appear to have been the owners of the castle. They soon suffered the aggression of the Medici, who saw the Mareri as an hindrance to their expansion in Abruzzo and in the L’Aquila area. Leone X de’ Medici had already appointed Alessandro Cesarini as cardinal in 1517. Taking advantage of a dispute between two Mareri, Clement VII de’ Medici assigned half of the castle to the cardinal. Alessandro Cesarini then completed the acquisition on an uncertain date, but before 1539. Recently discovered documents hint at a more complicated narrative, with an undisputed outcome: the castle became a Cesarini fief. Rumor had it at the time that the Medici pope had actually granted Cesarini and his family sole possession of the castle, with the obligation to maintain it and strengthen its strategic role on the border between the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples.

The turning point: the Sack of Rome in 1527

Alessandro Cesarini marked the turning point. The recent Sack of Rome prompted him to pay close attention to this fiefdom and building, which were not too far from the city but well protected by distance, the harshness of the terrain, the ease of their defense, and their strategic pivot function between Rome, Rieti, and the entire military quadrant between Lazio and L’Aquila.

The Cardinal looked for a secure location, but he did not want to give up the pleasures and beauty of aristocratic life. Hence his idea of transforming a medieval military fortress into a hybrid between a mighty fortified structure and a Renaissance palace.
Cesarini turned to Baldassarre Peruzzi, who was in Rome at the moment, and had been appointed Architect of St. Peter’s Basilica in 1530. The request to Peruzzi was probably made on the occasion of the staging of Plautus’ Bacchidi, commissioned by the Cesarini family for the wedding of Giuliano Cesarini and Giulia Colonna (May 28, 1531).

Peruzzi was perhaps the most suitable choice to reconcile the Cardinal’s contradictory requirements. One of the greatest military architects of the Renaissance, Peruzzi was also a civil architect of extraordinary finesse, as the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne alone would suffice to demonstrate. In some of his projects, Peruzzi had also theorized the overcoming of the strict distinction between villa and fortress, which was dear to military architects such as Francesco di Giorgio, Sangallo, and Leonardo. It was possible to combine military function and pleasant living in the same building, bringing both to their highest level.

Hence his new design for the castle of Rocca Sinibalda, summarized in three drawings recently rediscovered in the Uffizi Gallery (Florence): a front spur and a ‘tail’ to defend the two weak areas where the castle could be attacked; and a large central body — the ‘palace’—overlooking a rocky ridge. An ingenious configuration that coherently follows and continues the upward movement of the underlying rock. It was an unusual configuration, immediately interpreted by contemporaries as zoomorphic: an eagle with outstretched wings, a tribute to its warrior function and to the Habsburg eagle that Charles V had quartered in the Cesarini coat of arms for their loyal support of the Imperial cause; and also, sinister but close to the iconography of the Anti-Renaissance, a scorpion.

Work on rebuilding the old medieval structure began in 1532, and Peruzzi died in 1536. Living in poverty and desperately seeking new commissions that took him here and there between Lazio, Tuscany, and Umbria, Peruzzi certainly had little to do with the realization of his project.
Not much is known about who completed it—probably Andrea di Sangallo’s students and his own. A comparison between the drawings and the final building shows the many adaptations that had to be made during construction. Alessandro Cesarini and his cousin Giuliano then began the work of decorating the walls, inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses with important additions from the Cesarini family’s own narratives.
Girolamo Muziano, the Roman Mannerist workshops, and others yet to be identified participated with different styles, creating narrative cycles of great power and visionary quality. Many of the frescoes are still awaiting costly restoration.
In the decades following its renovation, the castle underwent the vicissitudes of the Cesarini family in the war with the Carafa family, then—in the 17th to 19th centuries—sieges, the explosion of the powder magazine (1710), fires, abandonment, decay, and a succession of other families: the Mattei, the Lante della Rovere, the Muti-Bussi, and the Lepri. This carousel of names lasted until very recently, in an inextricable tangle of legal rights and temporary possession often passed off as ownership, where the former are much more stable than they appear on paper, and one basic fact prevails: the long periods without any reliable information or documentation.

The history of Rocca Sinibalda Castle is as elusive as its identity. The castle still waits for attentive scholars willing to patiently rewrite its history, freeing it from the many errors, inventions, and inaccuracies that surround it . The beauty of this castle deserves it.