Piazza Castello

The bloody forays of the Rozzone in the Bergamo area were met with a vigorous offensive mounted by the Visconti, ending in the resounding defeat of the natives in 1386. The lances and halberds of the knights stand today as if left on the field of battle, for posterity. The first spear forcibly rammed into the ground shattered the surface, frozen under the morning frost, triggering a chain reaction that scarred and churned up the ground. This occurred simultaneously with the other 42 lances, 8 metres high, that are depicted in the square. Like the trajectories of a billiard ball, splitting the earth and then rebounding against the edge of the public area, unusual geometric lines are traced out on the basic rectangle. The plane of Piazza Castello at Castel Rozzone is not, moreover, perfectly horizontal: the blows to the ground by the mounted soldiers, with their lances, were enough to produce slight bumps – and matching depressions – little craters and landslides, which further illustrate the animosity of the battle. Every part of the ground is stone, both the slabs and the channels designed to collect the rainwater in the lee of the metal poles. The choice of the poles, and with them the channels, as elements creating the geometry of the layout and slope of the ground, strategically enables the flow of water towards the collection points along the ample runoffs between the ashlars; the wide gaps are therefore not solely to cope with the expansion of the material in the heat. The imaginary icy layer shattered by the halberds of the battle dictated a mantle of 2,900 stone elements, each one made to measure. Each slab is unique. The benches are raised from the ground and are made of simple blocks of generous widths. The water basin is also, on the outside, a work of stone, supplied to order, with its top edge featuring a light chiaroscuro effect, obtained by precisely extracting the material according to a continuous horizontal cut. The production and layout are the work of Trapattoni Marmi.