Castello di Senarega, Medieval castle in Valbrevenna, Italy

Castello di Senarega is a castle-tower on the highest slope of the hamlet of Senarega, in the municipality of Valbrevenna. Its square, plain palazzetto, built in the 15th century, stands beside the 13th-century tower and has a good number of rooms. On the ground floor a large fireplace serves a wide room; upstairs, the blackened walls point to the former wood-fired bread oven, from which one reached the tower and two rooms with arrow slits.

A tower existed by the 13th century, serving as a lookout and defence for the village; the lords of Senarega added the adjoining square palazzetto in the 15th century. Sources differ on the handover to the Fieschi, counts of Lavagna of the Savignone branch: some give 1685, others already the 15th century. Their lordship lasted until 1797, when Napoleon's First French Empire suppressed the imperial fiefs in Liguria.

The building is also called Senarega-Fieschi after the two noble families who owned it in succession. From 1838 it belonged to the local parish, and in the 1980s it housed a recovery community for people with addictions. Since 2014 the Ente Parco dell'Antola holds it on a thirty-year loan, and the farm Il Pioppo della famiglia Sciutto ran it for several years.

The castle stands on the highest slope of the borgo, above the stone houses; you reach it on foot along the village lanes and steep paths. It was taken on a thirty-year loan by the Ente Parco dell'Antola in 2014 and restored with a 1.2 million euro European grant, but it is not open as a staffed museum, so visits mean seeing the tower and palazzetto from outside.

The castle never saw major warfare, yet the palazzetto had a torture room with iron rings fixed to the ceiling and walls. A trapdoor in the floor, covered by two wooden boards, likely dropped condemned prisoners down a chute between horizontal iron blades, killing them by decapitation.