The largest fortified complex in Trentino-South Tyrol spreads its elliptical walls across a hilltop above Besenello, stretching about 250 meters, first documented in the twelfth century as a fief of the Counts of Appiano.
The castle's most consequential day came in 1487, when it served as the site of the Battle of Calliano between Venetian and Tyrolean forces, a clash that helped fix the border between Italian and German-speaking Trentino for centuries afterward. The Von Trapp family, of Sound of Music fame, owned the castle until donating it to the province in 1973, and restoration through the later twentieth century turned it into a branch of the Buonconsiglio Castle museum network, now drawing around forty thousand visitors a year with summer events staged inside its walls.
