Castello Baradello

This guide to Castello Baradello, above Lake Como, opens with a question about how long a man can survive caged against a stone wall on almost nothing. It follows the 1277 battle at Desio between the Della Torre and Visconti families for control of Milan, and the fate of the losing lord, Napoleone della Torre, whom the victorious archbishop Ottone Visconti had shut in a wooden cage and hung from this very tower, exposed to sun, frost and lake wind through a Lombard winter. Look up at the roughly thirty-meter tower Barbarossa's masons raised in the eleven fifties, the only part of the fortress imperial troops left standing centuries later.