Castelgrande

Why go

Castelgrande is a castle on San Michele hill in Bellinzona and one of the three castles that, with their walls, make up the Fortress of Bellinzona, which the regional tourism board says was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000. Bellinzona e Valli tourism says the hill was settled in the Neolithic, that the first archaeologically confirmed fortification dates from the fourth century AD, and that the castle was first called Castrum Magnum in the fourteenth century. It says the present complex combines a thirteenth-century core, a Milanese phase of 1473 to 1486 and later work, its current look coming from restorations of 1984 to 1991 directed by the architect Aurelio Galfetti, and it names the White Tower and the Black Tower, a museum and temporary exhibitions in the Sala Arsenale. The board says the Fortress Pass, sold online and at the castles' ticket offices and the Bellinzona InfoPoint, covers the three castles with their walls, the Castelgrande museum and the temporary exhibitions. This record is the castle, not the World Heritage property as a whole or its towers; the castles' own site was not read, so its current rules are not stated.