Entrance ticket that includes visits to the temporary exhibitions and the castle's inner courtyard.
About 600 meters southeast of the city of Bellinzona, at the highest point of the rocky outcrop on which the fortifications are located, stands Sasso Corbaro Castle, also known as Unterwalden Castle since 1506 and Santa Barbara Castle since 1818. The structure appears simple in its lines: with a square layout, it encloses a small courtyard, the buildings, two corner towers – the keep and the watchtower – and the crenellated walkway.
It is the only one of Bellinzona's three castles for which the exact start date of construction is known. Although the presence of a tower for controlling and observing the territory has been documented since the late 14th century, it was not until the early months of 1479 that construction began on the castle that can still be seen today. Intended to counter the increasingly frequent incursions into the county of Bellinzona by the Confederate armies, the construction of the castle was carried out with great speed – by order of the Duke – by the renowned Florentine architect Benedetto Ferrini, who died of the plague in the autumn of the same year. The work was finally completed by the ducal engineer Gabriele Ghiringhelli.
In addition to its primary defensive function, Sasso Corbaro Castle was also used as a place of detention. In the centuries that followed, after 1798, left to its own devices, it began to fall into disrepair. In the early 1870s, the Canton sold it to a company that intended to convert it into a hotel, and a few years later to three families from Bellinzona, who turned it into a summer residence. Today, it hosts temporary exhibitions, including the exquisite 17th-century wooden room, purchased by the Canton in 1944 from the heirs of the Poglia family, known as the “Poglia Room.”