Castello di Montebello — Azzurrina, the girl in the ice-house

OVERVIEW

The Castello di Montebello, also called the castle of the Guidi di Bagno, crowns a 436 m hill above the village of Montebello di Torriana in the province of Rimini. A notary's deed of 24 September 1186 records its sale to Giovanni Malatesta; the Malatesta made it a formidable castle. In 1464 Pope Pius II made Giovanni Francesco Guidi di Bagno count of Montebello for helping defeat Sigismondo Malatesta, and the family still owns it. It keeps a medieval keep, prisons, secret passages and defensive trapdoors.

HISTORY

Damaged in the Second World War, the castle was radically restored by the family in 1989 and opened to the public with paid admission. The so-called 'corridor of Azzurrina' shows the place where, according to the legend, she disappeared.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

In the legend, Guendalina Malatesta, born about 1370 to the feudal lord Ugolinuccio, was an albino; because superstition tied albinism to the Devil, her mother dyed her hair black with vegetable dyes that would not hold, giving it blue glints like her eyes — hence 'Azzurrina'. Kept indoors under two guards, she was playing with a rag ball during a storm on 21 June 1375 when it fell down the stair into the underground ice-house; the guards heard a scream, ran in by the only entrance, and found neither ball nor child. Her ghost is said to make itself heard every five years at the summer solstice. The Italian article is blunt: no historical source shows she existed, nor that the legend itself was ever known before 1989; the parish priest's manuscript of about 1620 said to record it has never been seen by anyone. Massimo Polidoro notes the coincidence with the castle's opening to paying visitors. Earlier writing (Tommaso Molari, early 1900s) records only a general folk belief in spirits and 'strange noises' from the trapdoors at night. The amateur recordings played to visitors at the end of the tour were made without scientific control; CICAP's own professional recordings on the solstice of 21 June 2010 picked up no sounds at all. Filed UNVETTED.

VISITING

Guided tours of the castle, including the 'Azzurrina corridor', end with the amateur recordings.