(Original headline: Octagonal castle of Frederick II oozes mystery in southern Italy )
BARI, Italy — At Castel del Monte, the stage is set for tragedy or black magic. Clouds scuttle across the sky, and a full moon rises. Footsteps echo on cold stone, startling pigeons into flight.
A medieval emperor hunted with falcons and cheetahs here, consulted astrologers and slept on Asian silk.
People sought refuge in the castle during the plague, and brigands hid out there. Vandals through the years stripped it, leaving little more than an empty shell on a lonely hilltop at the edge of the Murge — a barren limestone plateau worlds apart from the sunny Italian south most people know.
The medieval masterpiece, begun in 1240 — about the same time as Westminster Abbey — has eight sides linked by eight eightsided towers.
Its seemingly endless repetition of the octagonal form has haunted mathematicians through the ages who see it as a work of pure geometry. The more mystically inclined impute occult significance to this temple of the octagon, noting that great buildings throughout the world, such as Jerusalem’s 1,300-year-old Dome of the Rock, also have eight sides.
Whether icon or equation, the castle has more vibes than The Da Vinci Code, as I discovered when I visited in February. I love a good mystery. And Castel del Monte is surely one, a model for the labyrinthine library in Umberto Eco’s 1983 medieval whodunit, The Name of the Rose.
I stood in the castle’s deserted courtyard at dusk, wishing the walls could talk. But Castel del Monte, as silent as a sarcophagus and as strange as a UFO, keeps its secrets, glowing like the crown of its 13 th-century builder, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II.
Cultured and brutal, despotic and enlightened, a Christian crusader who was excommunicated, Frederick left a legacy that historians still debate. In his time and after, he was called stupor mundi (the wonder of the world) and the Antichrist.
A 1927 biography of Frederick by German historian Ernst Kantorowicz was a favorite of Adolf Hitler’s, whose delusions of grandeur were fueled partly by the emperor’s efforts to consolidate a realm that included Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, parts of France and Italy, Malta, Cyprus, Israel and Lebanon.
To oversee his vast domain, Frederick traveled widely and incessantly. He took with him his crown jewels, library, elephants, camels, hunting birds, bodyguards, poets and mathematicians.
Of all the lands he ruled, he loved low-lying Puglia best, in those days a richly forested region bordered on the east by the Adriatic Sea. Here he built his startling octagonal castle: part hunting lodge, part pleasure palace and part symbol of might.
The chamber above the entrance is thought to have been Frederick’s throne room. Although most of the castle’s embellishments are long gone, some marble fireplaces, graceful three-tiered columns and cunningly sculpted capitals remain.
Among great architectural ciphers, Castel del Monte stands out for its stubborn unlockability, although it is less well-known than others chiefly because it is in the relatively unrestrained, ill-reputed Mezzogiorno, at the heel of the Italian boot.
Warnings about the region’s poverty and crime rang in my ears. I wore a money belt and resolved not to let my guard down, especially in Bari, the Puglian capital of 300,000.
I later found my way up the coast to Trani, a quiet town with another Frederican castle dating from 1233 and an exquisite Puglian Romanesque cathedral on the waterfront.
San Nicola Pellegrino, the third of three churches built one on top of the other, has a tall, elegant campanile; a fancifully decorated facade featuring all the animals in Frederick’s menagerie; and a finely crafted 12 th-century bronze door (now inside the church for safekeeping).
Barletta, about 10 miles north of Trani, has another striking Puglian Romanesque cathedral and was where Frederick launched a crusade in 1228 to liberate then-Muslimcontrolled Jerusalem, after repeated promptings from Pope Gregory IX. The emperor’s tardiness in getting started earned him excommunication.
