An emperor’s perfect octagon, and nobody knows what it was for
On a hill 540 metres up in Apulia, the Emperor Frederick II built in the 1240s a castle unlike any other: a perfect octagon with an octagonal tower at each of its eight corners, eight rooms on each of its two floors, and an eight-sided courtyard in the middle. It has no moat and no drawbridge, and nobody is sure what it was for. It was long called a hunting lodge, though nothing proves Frederick used it as one, and scholars now think it had a curtain wall and served as a citadel. The octagon has been read as a bridge between the square of the earth and the circle of the sky, and traced to the Dome of the Rock, which Frederick saw on crusade, or to the Palatine Chapel at Aachen. Esoteric writers tie it to the Knights Templar; the historian Raffaele Licinio insisted it had nothing to do with them. It later held Manfred of Sicily’s sons as prisoners, lost its marble to the Bourbons, and almost certainly inspired the fortress library of The Name of the Rose. A UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996.
Andria, Apulia, Italy
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