Extraordinary weekend evening opening for the Castle of Malcesine. Every Friday and Saturday, until the end of August, the fortress perched in the town centre will keep its gates open until 10 p.m. (opens at 9:30 a.m. and closes normally at 7 p.m.). An experience under the stars with a unique view of the lake, made even more impressive by the new lighting inside the Scaliger fortress. The Scaliger castle is considered the symbol of Malcesine and its origin dates back to the last centuries of the first millennium BC. In 1902 it was declared a National Monument.
Short guide
One enters the courtyard. On the left is the ‘Casermetta’: a lower building where the castle guard was housed. The basement and ground floor house the Natural History Museum. An external staircase leads to the top floor, a room used for exhibitions and weddings.
The Natural History Museum offers visitors an original multimedia approach, making the visit a complete sensory experience: one can look, touch, smell, listen, or use touch screens. The new layout treats the objects as works of art, shows and interprets the themes, and adopts clever choreographic solutions that also consider the landscape seen through the windows as an integral part of the tour. At the far end of the courtyard, one reaches a balcony which, jutting out above the waters of the lake at a height of 24 metres from the surface, allows a wide and impressive view of the lake itself and the surrounding mountains.
One climbs up a stepped ramp to the powder magazine built by the Austrians, today the ‘Goethe Hall‘. On display are pictures that Goethe sketched of the lake and the castle in his Italian Journey. The colours of the region are reproduced, as they presented themselves to his gaze and according to what would later become his Theory of Colours. Beyond the hall, in the small garden, set in a contemplative corner, is the bust of the Poet. From here you go up to the second courtyard, known as the ‘Rivellino’, from where you can admire the village, the lake and the western flank of Mount Baldo. Civil marriages are celebrated on the Rivellino.
The Tower dominates Malcesine with its irregular pentagonal shape, rising 70 metres above the lake and 31 metres high at its base.
Prices
– Adult € 6,00
– Reduced (over 65 years, 14 to 18 years) € 5,00
– Child (6 to 13 years) € 3.00
– Free ( 0 to 5 years old)
