Hernando de Alarcón e la «torre di Ciaia» a Napoli. L’architettura fortificata come memoria familiare

Among the most interesting Neapolitan fortified architectures of the first half of the 16th century, the extramoenia residence of the de Alarcón y Mendoza family was built around 1535 along the coast of the hamlet of Chiaia by Hernando de Alarcón, Marquis della Valle, a valiant man-at-arms who was inextricably linked to Emperor Charles V and to Viceroy Pedro de Toledo for his military merits. During decisive years in the residential re-functionalization of the hamlet, well beyond the defensive needs precisely the severe quadrangular tower - the original nucleus of the palace ascribable to the royal architect Ferdinando Manlio - would have represented a strongly identifying element, a sort of monument to the family memory jealously preserved and surviving the various seventeenth-nineteenth-century modernizations and the radical transformation of the building in the post-unification years.