Tagliacozzo

The town sits at 740 meters at the foot of a mountain whose summit, 998 meters up, still carries the ruined castle of the counts of the Marsi. Below it, the built-up center reads in layers: the palace begun by Roberto Orsini at the end of the fourteenth century passed later to the Colonna, and Marcantonio Colonna, third duke of Tagliacozzo, went on to be the hero of Lepanto in 1571. The old town gathers around Piazza dell'Obelisco, where Renaissance loggias ring a fountain-obelisk raised in 1824, and the Franciscan convent's cloister sits within the same medieval fabric, now doubling as a festival venue alongside the nineteenth-century theater.

Tagliacozzo gave its name to the battle fought on the plain to its east, where Charles of Anjou broke Hohenstaufen power in 1268, a moment Dante thought worth naming in the Inferno. A mountain fortress, a ducal palace with a duke who fought at Lepanto, and a battlefield that changed a kingdom: the town's whole layout, castle above, palace and piazza below, still traces the passage from medieval military seat to Renaissance ducal capital.