Inaugurated in 1998, the museum itinerary includes the basements, the Gothic rooms on the ground floor, the former kitchens, the Lion Tower, the Mirror Apartment, and allows you to visit fifteen rooms of the Castle, following a route that, from the undergrounds of the Lion Tower, with the prisons, connects to the ground floor to reach the noble floor. This way, you retrace the rooms once inhabited by the Dukes, where you can still admire the decorative apparatus, characterized by marbles and frescoes. Between 2001 and 2003, the most historically, artistically and architecturally significant environments were connected with a philological reconstruction of strong educational impact, designed by architect Gae Aulenti. The visit revolves around four themes, different from each other but related to the Castle: the building as an image of power, the dynasty, the urban history of Ferrara, and finally the Este domains. Since 2006, the Castle has also been the representative seat of the Ermitage Italy project, the result of an agreement between the Hermitage Museum of Saint Petersburg and the Province of Ferrara, aimed at cataloging the Italian works of the Russian museum, with special attention to the Este heritage. The visit route runs through the Gothic Rooms, the Ducal Kitchens, the Cordolo Room adjacent to the original tower which it partly incorporates, the Prison of Don Giulio. On the noble floor is the Aurora Room, located inside the Lion Tower, which is part, together with the Games Room and the Playroom, of the private and representative apartments built by the Dukes from the second half of the 15th century. The decoration of the rooms was entrusted to the Filippi family (father Camillo and sons Cesare and Sebastiano), assisted by Leonardo da Brescia and Ludovico Settevecchi: all datable to the third last decade of the 16th century. Also worth remembering are the “Alabaster Chambers” intended for the ducal collections that included paintings by Titian, Dosso Dossi and Garofalo arranged according to an iconographic program centered on the theme of the bacchanal and alternated with sculptures by Antonio Lombardo.
Information about Este Castle
Piazzetta Castello, 1,
44121 Ferrara (Ferrara)
0532299111
castelloestense@provincia.fe.it
https://www.castelloestense.it
Source: MIBACT
