Continuing the journey through the castles and heading from Lucera to Bari, we stop in Andria with Castel del Monte, with a perfect octagonal design built according to the mysterious laws of the sidereal spaces.
It stands on one of the highest heights of the Murge, appears from afar and it takes very little to realize that it is not a military work: there is no ditch, it does not have a drawbridge, it does not have the posts for the arches and crossbows, not it has the drains, as well as the stables, the dormitories, the kitchens, the warehouses, the undergrounds for the prisoners.
It was built by Frederick II in the first half of the thirteenth century and does not control obligatory passages, has no secret ways to try to escape and the spiral staircases of the towers are screwed so as to free the armed right hand of the enemy that was climbing.
Castel del Monte, the hunting lodge "built by the sun"
Documents that can illuminate the reason why it was built are not left, except for a few letters in which it is mentioned that the castle was a hunting lodge, but the walls just over 20 meters suggest that for Federico II Castel del Monte must represent something more than a hunting lodge.
If we consider these walls as a gnomon (the pole that the ancients planted on earth to measure the hours of the day based on the length of the shadows that projected) we can safely say that the true architects of this castle were the sun and the zodiac, the plant is drawn by the sun.
In fact, we find that at midday of the autumn equinox (September 23, when the sun enters the sign of Libra) the shadow of the gnomon stretches over the courtyard, stopping exactly at the base of the inner wall. This can be a coincidence. But if we go back to Castel del Monte a month later, when the sun enters the Scorpio, the shadow coincides with the outer walls, and the doubt that it was the Libra to mark the width of the courtyard is added to the Scorpio have marked the width of the rooms.
We return in November, when the sun enters the Sagittarius, and here the shadow, passing through the walls, touches exactly the circumference within which the towers are enclosed.
Castel del Monte was designed in an astral order?
In December the Capricorn's shadow coincides with an octagonal fence outside the castle: today it is no longer there, but remains documented until 1897, when it was destroyed.
And it is not enough, because another element has disappeared, a still octagonal basin - as was the octagonal cup of the Holy Grail emerald - which was in the middle of the courtyard, even the measures of this tank would have been marked by the shadow of the wall -gnomon in the summer months before September.
The sun would have also determined the choice of the place where the building stands, so we must admit the first, unexpected truth: that the castle was designed in an astral order completely independent of the laws of architecture.
