«Il bel palatio in forma di castello». Da Delorme a Stirling passando per Viollet-le-Duc e Coppedè

The contribution aims to retrace the history of the castle's decline as the fortified residence of a feudal lord in favour of the affirmation of its individual components (walls, towers, battlements, pinnacles, moat, drawbridge, etc.), elected over the centuries as vehicles of identity. Indeed, they are intended not only to evoke an often imaginary past, but also and above all to communicate the possession by a civil architecture of the prerogatives proper to any fortified architecture such as a sense of security, a sense of power, a sense of wealth and a sense of nobility. A long, multiform, continuous and current history, marked as much by inventive leaps as by caricatured emulations, which begins with the Palazzo del Bargello in Florence, the first example of a palace-fortress placed in the heart of the city, then passes through the works and projects of the greatest masters of historical architecture and arrives, in the second half of the 20th century, at the cultured citationism of the post-modern age.