Memoria e conoscenza. Il castello di Belmonte in Calabria

A small A small village located in Italy on the Calabrian Tyrrhenian coast, Belmonte Calabro has its historic center with a typical medieval urban structure that has remained almost unchanged over the centuries and is characterized by the presence of the ruins of a castle and its surrounding environments whose. The planimetry succeeds to be identified because it is bordered by a wall, only partially preserved, pronounced by towers and marked by a road that, in its main points still existing, follows its development. The castle, built on the hill’s top of a tuff nature, in an elevated position respect to the urban core, had a plan with a roughly quadrangular shape with four imposing square towers. Of particular note is its curtain wall that originally had four doors, which opened in correspondence at the four cardinal points. In addition to having suffered several collapses in many parts of its structure due to the various earthquakes that occurred over time, as well as various looting and the siege by the French artillery dating back to the early 1800s, the castle is currently subjected to degrading actions due to the attack of biological type, which manifests itself with a widespread presence of patinas, as well as those due to a thick weed vegetation that affects many of the surfaces of its structure. The study aims to provide a useful contribution to reconstructing the profile of the original structure of the ancient castle. To obtain, therefore, more information about it, a specific survey plan was developed to characterize its constituent materials and also its state of preservation. To this end, in correspondence of structural parts still intact, samples were collected that were analyzed and characterized in the laboratory by Raman Spectroscopy.