Castel Casez

It stands on the square of Casez, a hamlet of Sanzeno, at 629 metres: more than a castle, it is the fortified house of a family of the lesser nobility of the Val di Non, and for this reason it is also called casa or palazzo Concini. It has kept something of the fortress: the square tower to the west, with its wooden roof, still has the arrow slits at the top and corners built of granite blocks.

In the thirteenth century there was a single tower in its place, a fief of the Bragherio of Coredo. In the mid-fourteenth century a branch of the Concini took it over, a family that came from Tuenno and was ennobled by the prince-bishop of Trento between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and which at the beginning of the fifteenth century built the new house and altered it several times, up to the eighteenth-century east wing.

The present appearance dates from the nineteenth century. Around 1890 Baron Raffaele de Concini sold the property, and from 1893 the new owner transformed it: he demolished the crenellated ravelin and changed the look of the palace, which between the two towers had a stepped facade with an eighteenth-century sundial and two Gothic mullioned windows. Something was saved: one mullioned window is still at the corner where it stood, the other was walled into the west facade of the new part, and the pointed-arch portal of the ravelin ended up on the south one. The courtyard at the foot of the west tower has remained largely as it was in the fifteenth century. It is private property.