Castello di Gabiano, Medieval castle in Gabiano, Italy.
Castello di Gabiano is a medieval castle perched on a hilltop overlooking the Po River valley, built with stone walls, towers, and an extensive underground cellar network. The complex contains renovated luxury suites within the castle walls, a swimming pool, and manicured gardens featuring a geometric maze.
Documented from the 8th century as the curtis magna named Gabiano, the castle was donated in 1164 by Frederick Barbarossa to Marquis William II of Montferrat. Contested over the centuries by several families, it was ceded in 1622 with the title of Marquis of Gabiano by Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga to the Genoese nobleman Agostino Durazzo to settle Mantua's debts to his family.
The Gabiano DOC, one of Italy's oldest and smallest denominations, is produced here; it won a gold medal at the 1937 Paris Universal Exposition. The Adorno family farms 260 hectares, 20 of them vineyards at 300 m, and bottles only in great vintages.
The castle stands above the Po valley in Gabiano, with the medieval borgo, the cellars and the park maze all on the estate. The vineyards cover 20 of the estate's 260 hectares, on hillsides at about 300 m between Gabiano and Moncestino. The maze, laid out in the 1930s, sits in the heart of the park, so allow separate time for the cellars and for the grounds.
The maze in the park is one of the very few documented historic garden labyrinths in Piedmont, and it was laid out only in the 1930s, within Lamberto Cusani's restoration for Matilde Giustiniani. Its geometric lines sit inside the natural park, echoing the medieval idea of the forest as a natural labyrinth and the labyrinth as an artificial forest.
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