The Entrance Tower

The Entrance Tower

It has a rectangular plan and it is provided with an escarp as the rest of the fortress. This is a characteristic that qualifies it as a fortification of transaction.

The western wall run into this tower. From this tower you entered into the fortress (the sidegate was on a different level) through a draw-bridge and a wooden stair, to be destroyed in case of danger. The today south-western entrance was an emergency sidegate open to the outside. Later it became the only easy way of entering into the fortress without resorting to the wooden stair, which had become in the meantime uncomfortable and anacronystic.

The entrance tower is equipped with two muskets loopholes which were used to sight the enemy. The one at the left of the door pointed to those trying to climb the tower (if the wooden stairs had not been destroyed in time); the other pointed to the section of the castle wall running into the tower, in case that the besiegers had arrived there. The tower could count on a further defence: on the escarpment and on the merlons running on the jutting out parapet. From the machicolations (small trap-doors on the top floor) they could either throw heavy things down or shoot from the top with cross-bows and arquebus.

The tower was surrounded by a ditch and the draw picturing the seventeenth-century Urbisaglia castle from the high, shows a ditch, though not very clearly, under the southern tower.

(Abstract from maurizio Mauro, "La Rocca di Urbisaglia", Adriapress ed. Ravenna).

Regione Marche

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