Castello di Montalto
The castle of Montalto lies east of Siena, Italy, in an area known as ‘la Berardenga’, which is an extensive territory in the Chianti region of Tuscany.
To the right is the church of San Martino, and a fresco on the inside of the entry tower depicts the famous scene of the saint sharing his cloak with a beggar.
To the left is a loggia with four arches from which one has access to the main villa and the Sala d’Armi (Hall of Arms) with its large fireplace and collection of lances, armor and weapons dating from the 14th century onward.
The upper portion of the walls in the Sala d’Armi is decorated with frescoes depicting farmhouses belonging to the castle in the 16th century and vignettes of every-day activities on the land of the Berardenga (hunting, farming, etc.).
The watchtower has loop-holes and ramparts which hint to the castle's past as a stronghold on the highly contested border between the rivaling towns of Siena and Florence.
The complex includes six other buildings and is surrounded by a wall of stone and brick attesting to repeated war damage and reconstructions.
However, there are a number of documents between 1104 and 1212[4] registering donations and sales of land to others (including the nearby Monastery), indicating perhaps that the Berardeschi family may have been encountering increasing economic difficulties.
Witness to these repeated attacks are the numerous requests to Siena on the part of Montalto's inhabitants for financial help in rebuilding its walls or other fortifications.
[18] These repeated battles and changes of control consumed a large amount of resources, damaged crops, and took quite a toll on the castle and its inhabitants.
Things were not easy at first: in 1553 Montalto was taken by the Florentines and the Spanish troops of Emperor Charles V (allied with Florence), who then set it on fire before continuing on to nearby San Gusmè.
Even the church of San Martino results in bad shape and completely bare, as noted in a 1567 pastoral visit report.
[20] Francesco and Scipione Palmieri (sons of Giovanni) started to restore the castle in 1570-1572, adding Renaissance-style embellishments such as the graceful portico along the facade facing the courtyard.
The chapel was whitewashed and received a new floor and altar furnishings in 1583, though at this point it was no longer an autonomous parish but annexed to the nearby monastery.
A series of frescoes depicting coats of arms and life on the estate's sharecropping farms was added in the great hall some time between 1570 and 1587.
A demographic study[21] commissioned in 1676 by the grand duke of Tuscany Cosimo III de' Medici lists 7 housing groups at Montalto for a total of 50 people, 32 of them men (not including the Palmieris themselves).
A new restoration was undertaken in the middle of the 19th century by Giuseppe Palmieri and completed by his son Antonio in 1908, in the neo-Gothic style popular at the time.
The defensive walls were rebuilt, the watchtower restored to something like its original height, and a new gate tower was built to give entrance to the courtyard.
Starting in the 1950s and continuing through the 1970s, small scale farming in Italy became less profitable and farmers abandoned the land to search for work in larger towns.
The document seals the 1090 sale of a piece of land with vineyard, located in the valley below the castle (subtus castro de Monte Alto), by Berardo IV son of Ildebrando to Enizello of the Ubaldini family.
128 8^ SANZANOME IUDICIS, “Gesta Florentinorum”, ed G. Milanesi in “Cronache dei secoli XII-XIV” (“Documenti di storia italiana”, VI) pag.
