History of the Village
With its two castles, Strassoldo is a rare example of an ancient medieval village, extremely well preserved and of rare charm.
Since their construction, the manors have been inhabited by the eponymous patrician family of German origin, the counts of Strassoldo-Graffemberg, who were one of the first families of free feudal lords and who have provided the Habsburg Empire of Austria with a long series of important officials and generals. The Strassoldo family is one of the few examples of feudal lords who have always maintained possession of the castles since their foundation, inhabiting them from then until today.
The toponym, of Germanic origin, is linked to its location along a road (Strasse) and on an island, “Aue”; in fact, the original castle was built more than a thousand years ago on a natural islet of the river along the ancient Julia Augusta road (a Roman road that connected Aquileia to Noricum). It is believed that there was an early fortified structure from the Ottonian era to counter the raids of the Hungarians and perhaps earlier in the Lombard period to guard the plain against the Byzantine presence in the lagoon.
Originally there was only one manor, called “from the two towers”; some centuries later, around each of the two original towers, two distinct castle complexes developed, which took the names of Castello di Sotto and Castello di Sopra; the Strassoldo family thus divided into the two branches of “those of Sopra” and “those of Sotto”.
The castles, over the centuries, were subject to complex political-military events: suffice it to say that in 1381 they were besieged by the militias of Patriarch Filippo d’Alençon, in 1499 they were brushed by Turkish raids, to resist which in 1500 they were equipped with an additional wall and towers. Subsequently, they were destroyed by the imperial armies in 1509, when they were attacked by the troops belonging to the League of Cambrai. Around the mid-18th century, both fortified structures of Strassoldo underwent significant restorations by the brothers Nicolò (for Castello di Sotto) and Giuseppe (for Castello di Sopra), assuming the current configuration that sees the transformation of the fortified complex into two noble residences surrounded by centuries-old parks and crossed by the clear waters of two spring rivers, and precisely because of the many watercourses that surround them, they are called “water castles”.
The monumental complex appears today in its 18th-century remodeling, still allowing a glimpse of the configuration of the ancient manor used as a tool of defense and offense.