Castel del Monte is located in the territory of Andria, in Puglia. On each of the eight corners, it has eight towers of the same shape in the local limestone curtain walls, marked by a string course; eight single-light windows open on the lower floor, seven biforas and only one trifora, facing Andria, on the upper floor.
The courtyard of Castel del Monte, octagonal in shape, is characterized, like the whole building, by the color contrast derived from the use of coral breccia, limestone and marbles; in the past there were also ancient sculptures, of which only the slab depicting the Procession of the knights and a Fragment of an anthropomorphic figure remain.
At the upper floor level, three French doors open, beneath which there are some projecting elements and some holes, perhaps intended to support a wooden balcony useful to make the rooms independent from each other, all connected to each other with a circular route, except for the first and the eighth, separated by a wall in which a large oculus opens at the top, probably used to communicate.
The sixteen rooms, eight per floor, have a trapezoidal shape and have been covered with an ingenious solution. The space is in fact divided into a central square bay covered with ribbed cross vaults (with half-columns in coral breccia on the ground floor and three-lobed marble pillars above), while the remaining triangular spaces are covered by pointed barrel vaults.
The keystones of the cross vaults are different from each other, decorated with anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and phytomorphic elements.
The connection between the two floors takes place through three spiral staircases inserted in as many towers.
Some of these towers house cisterns for collecting rainwater, partly also channeled towards the cistern carved into the rock, beneath the central courtyard.
In other towers, instead, there are bathrooms, equipped with latrines and sinks, all flanked by a small room, probably used as a changing room or perhaps intended to house ablution basins, as body care was much practiced by Frederick II and his court, following a custom typical of that Arab world so loved by the sovereign.
The sculptural set is of great interest which, although strongly depleted, provides a significant testimony of the original decorative apparatus, once also characterized by the wide color range of the materials
used: mosaic tesserae, majolica tiles, vitreous pastes and wall paintings, some of which at the end of the 18th century and the early 19th century some local writers and historians saw traces of, describing them in their works.
The two anthropomorphic corbels in the Falconer’s Tower, the telamones supporting the umbrella vault of one of the stair towers, and a fragment of the floor mosaic in the eighth room on the ground floor are still present today. Two important sculptural fragments, depicting a Head and a headless Bust, found during the long restorations, which did not reveal any trace, however, of the octagonal basin placed in the center of the courtyard, mentioned by some scholars of the last century, have been temporarily deposited in the Provincial Art Gallery of Bari.
