Castello di Sant'Anna

It stands on a wooded hill, the Doss Alto, at 715 metres between Cloz and Arsio, in the municipality of Novella, enclosed on three sides by the gorge of the Novella. It looks straight at the castle of Vasio, on the other side of the gorge, and together with it guarded the crossing over the torrent. It is also called the lower castle of Arsio.

It was built in 1334 by Niccolò d'Arsio, with the permission of Count Enrico of Tyrol, even though the family already had the castle of Arsio. According to the historian Bruno Ruffini, the count wanted a castle of his own to set against the bishop's castle of Vasio. It soon took its name from the chapel of Sant'Anna, where people from the surrounding villages also went on pilgrimage.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century Frederick IV of Habsburg besieged and destroyed it, together with the castle of Arsio, to punish Ulrico d'Arsio, an ally of his enemy Enrico di Rottenburg; only in 1428 were the Arsio able to rebuild it. During the peasant revolt of the early sixteenth century some rebels were imprisoned there, and in the same century the façade was remade in Renaissance forms, with a mullioned window and the portal bearing the Arsio coat of arms.

The Arsio lived there until the middle of the eighteenth century, then entrusted it to farmers; two fires, in 1819 and in 1821, ruined it, and the tower was lowered. At the end of the nineteenth century it was a ruin with only the chapel intact, and the chapel is still there: walls up to one metre thirty thick and an arrow slit, because it was part of the defences, and inside an altarpiece by Franz Sebald Unterberger with Sant'Anna, the coats of arms of the families related to the Arsio and eighteenth-century ex votos. The castle is a private house and cannot be visited.