Halfway between Florence and Bologna, perched in the Apennine foothills near the village of Riola, stands one of Italy's oddest buildings. Rocchetta Mattei looks like a mash-up of the Alhambra and a Gothic fairytale — and that is exactly what it was meant to be.
The castle began life in the 1850s, when Count Cesare Mattei, grieving his mother's death from cancer, reinvented himself as a self-taught healer. He built the place on the ruins of a medieval fortress as part home, part laboratory, part clinic. From its striped columns, Moorish domes and Art Nouveau staircases, he promoted a treatment he called electrohomeopathy, based on plant extracts and their supposed electrical properties. It sounds eccentric now, but it travelled: Dostoevsky even name-checked it in a novel.
The count kept adding flourishes until his death in 1896, always a little short of his ambitions. He designed the elaborate "Nineties Room" for the birthday bash he planned to throw himself at 90 — he died at 87. After decades of neglect in the late 20th century, the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna bought and restored the castle, and since 2015 it has welcomed visitors.
Inside, it feels less like a stately home than an eccentric museum: maze-like corridors, fantastical creatures such as a hippogriff rendered in stone, and a jumble of references to astrology, Islamic art and ancient mythology. Black-and-white striped staircases zigzag through the floors in ways that make little architectural sense and delight everyone who walks them.
Practicalities matter here, because you cannot just wander in. Entry is by guided tour only, with an advance reservation required. Tickets cost €12 for adults and €6 for children aged 6–12, with reduced rates available, and the visit takes about an hour to ninety minutes. Opening hours are weekends only: April through October offers two daily slots (9:30am–1pm and 3–5:30pm), while the winter schedule runs roughly 10am–3pm. You can drive, or take the train to Riola and walk 15–20 minutes uphill.
For walkers, there is a bonus. The final stage of the Via Mater Dei, a trail running from Bologna through the Apennines, passes the castle and delivers a fine view of its rooftops from outside. That full leg takes about seven and a half hours, but shorter stretches are perfectly doable.
Rocchetta Mattei suits travellers who like their sights a bit odd: a count's fever dream in stone, an hour from Bologna, best combined with Emilia-Romagna's food towns. April to June or September to October brings good weather for both the tour and the trail.
