Robert Guiscard, the Norman leader who had just received the dukedom of Puglia and Calabria, ordered this castle built in 1076 over fortifications that likely dated to the Byzantine era, when the town was known as Aghia Severini.
The Angevins later modernized it with cylindrical towers and thicker walls, and in the sixteenth century Andrea Carafa expanded the defenses further with new fortified rings around the older Angevin core. Ownership shifted from the Carafa to the Ruffo, Sculco and Greuther families before feudalism's abolition in 1806 passed the castle to Church jurisdiction, and then to the town after Italian unification in 1860. Excavations between 1994 and 1998 recovered protohistoric bronzes from the fifteenth to eighth centuries BC, now displayed alongside a documentation center on Calabrian castles inside the same walls.
