The castle today appears as a massive building lacking those towers, crenellated walls, and drawbridges that characterized it in the past. However, it is easy to imagine how the access arch was actually a much taller tower and the underlying path a drawbridge. Below, all around the defensive walls, flowed a moat. It was an additional defense but also a means of access to and from the manor. On the ground floor, there is an 18th-century small theater with ornamental frescoes and wooden boxes intricately decorated with paintings of the era. In a room on the ground floor, a cycle of frescoes dating back to the 14th century with a chivalric theme was recently discovered. Inside, still well preserved, are the large kitchen on the first floor with the wide hearth and the private chapel decorated with 17th-century stuccoes.

What you see in the photos is not a castle: or rather, it is not just a castle. It is a time machine, which in a few months will be available to tourists, art enthusiasts, and all those who want to organize events such as conferences and fairy-tale weddings. Let's get to know the beating heart of Valvasone.

The complex and massive building that dominates Piazza Castello with its bulk and probably constitutes the most evocative element of the urban landscape of Valvasone presents itself today as the sum of a very long series of interventions, most likely without interruption, on the foundations of an initial late ancient tower of a defensive and lookout nature. In the absence of direct investigations on the current construction, it is not an easy task to precisely identify the different phases and building methods, although to a somewhat trained eye, details from the early 14th century will not escape, alongside others from the 15th-16th centuries but also from the 17th-19th centuries.

In plan, it presents itself as a sort of ring, which alterations have interrupted, almost completely erasing the details that tradition attributes to these structures: towers, crenellated walls, drawbridges. The access, having crossed the moat once filled with water and now dry, occurs through a single door opened in what remains of a very probable tower then incorporated, with the leveling in height, into the surrounding walls and protected by a sort of antechamber.

The inner courtyard, with the circular well almost at its center, features an irregular perimeter all surrounded by high masonry walls that give it, from a volumetric perspective, the appearance of an elongated prism.

Right in front of the entrance gate, it is possible to see what remains of the 15th-century keep, which was once 18 meters high before being demolished in 1884 because it was now dangerous due to the damage suffered from the passage of time and seismic shocks.

Inside, on the ground floor, in a hall already decorated with a late 16th-century pictorial frieze attributable to two currently anonymous hands and other pictorial interventions of which only the restoration begun will provide an account, at the beginning of the 19th century, a small theater was erected (recently deprived of the proscenium sold on the antique market) with a row of wooden boxes, the central one reserved for members of the count's family.

On the first floor, a large hall with an exposed beam ceiling. In other rooms of this and the previous wing, a series of rooms illustrated by high-quality pictorial cycles ("cineserie" and exotic subjects) from the very early 19th century, probably linked to the Napoleonic campaigns in Egypt.

In the central wing, the large kitchen where the very large fireplace, almost reminiscent of Nievo, and the domestic chapel whose small altar is decorated with late 17th-century stuccoes by Bernardino Barelio are still visible.

The castle must be considered, throughout the Middle Ages, solely a military structure. Its main function was to defend the portion of territory over which it had military jurisdiction. However and wherever it was built in the patriarchate, even if desired by an individual or a community, it fell under the authority of the patriarch, except for the few arising in territories retained by the emperor or, in his stead, by his beneficiaries.

The castle suffered severe damage from the earthquakes of 1976. The roof was dislodged, and the rains invaded the attics and the lower floors of the northwest wing. Only in June 1979 did the Superintendence of Monuments restore the roof.

The castle, which is now a national monument, had the honor of hosting, besides Napoleon Bonaparte, other illustrious figures: in 1409, Pope Gregory XII was welcomed there on his return from the Council of Cividale, and on March 12, 1782, Pope Pius VI stopped there on his way to Vienna.