page_title: Verrès Castle
section_title: Second floor
hierarchical_section_title: Verrès Castle / Description / Second floor
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Beccatelli nel castello di Verres in Valle d'Aosta
context_page_description: Verrès Castle is a fortified 14th-century castle in Verrès, in the lower Aosta Valley, in north-western Italy. It has been called one of the most impressive buildings from the Middle Ages in the area. Built as a military fortress by Yblet de Challant in the fourteenth century, it was one of the first examples of a castle constructed as a single structure rather than as a series of buildings enclosed in a circuit wall.
  The castle stands on a rocky promonitory on the opposite side of the Dora Baltea from Issogne Castle. The castle dominates the town of Verrès and the access to the Val d'Ayas. From the outside it looks like an austere cube, thirty metres long on each side and practically free of decorative elements.
context_section_description: The second floor of the bastion, which cannot be visited on the guided tour, replicates the division of the first floor and was probably used by functionaries and guests of the castle. Above the lord's dining hall is a hall, probably used at some point as a council hall. The wooden roof and stone fireplace of this hall, like those in the other rooms on this floor, were reconstructed and restored in the last few decades. They had been ruined by the weathering, to which they were exposed after the removal of the manor's roof. The rooms on the east side have two latrines like those on the first floor. The room above the kitchen in the northwest corner contains a hatch leading to a ledge on the outside, possibly used as a service exit or perhaps for signalling.
  Wooden stairs, completely reconstructed, connect this floor to the attic. The rooms of the attic are subdivided in the same way as the floors below and were probably used by the soldiers and servants of the castle and for storing rocks. Going out from the attic, it is possible to access the Chemin de ronde which runs around the outside of the four sides of the building for about 120 metres and contains 148 machicolations. Going inwards there is a wooden gallery which faces the interior courtyard and whose roofing serves to drain rainwater into the courtyard. The stone roof was completely reconstructed in the 1980s.
caption: Detail of the corbels and machicolations which extend from the walls
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