The castle is built from 1385, around the existing Torre dei Leoni, as a fortress following a revolt of the Ferrarese population itself against the Este seigniory.
Over the centuries, the building grew in importance and partially lost its defensive function, becoming the residence of the Este dukes, connected to the Ducal Palace through a passageway that gradually acquired the role of a real building: the so-called Via Coperta, on whose upper floors Duke Alfonso I had his famous “camerini” built and decorated.
The Via Coperta overlooks the little wall and the section of the course where the infamous “Castle Massacre” took place, perpetrated on the night of November 15, 1943, when fascists killed eleven innocent people in revenge by shooting them.
The massacre became the protagonist of a story by Giorgio Bassani and the famous film “La lunga notte del ’43” by Florestano Vancini. The so-called Via Coperta is the result of three architectural phases commissioned by Ercole I d’Este, his wife Eleonora d’Aragona and their son Alfonso I d’Este, and succeeding each other between 1470 and 1520. The building constitutes the connecting wing between the Castello Estense and the Ducal Palace, that is, between what had become the residence of the dukes in the time of Ercole and the palace where power was administered. The building consists of the connecting corridor from the second floor of the Municipal Palace to the courtyard of the Castle (built by Hercules), the high body of the building built over the moat and leaning against the Tower of St. Michael (wanted by Eleanor as an addition to her apartments), and the upper part of the “bridge” between Piazza Savonarola and Piazza Castello, used by Alfonso I as an apartment and ducal study. Today, after years in which Alfonso’s former apartment was adapted as the residence of the Prefect, the Via Coperta has been integrated into the museum itinerary and a reconstruction, or rather a suggestion, of what was the original vocation of a part of the structure, namely the “alabaster dressing rooms,” has been attempted. Like each of the previous dukes, Alfonso had his personal apartment built: the Camerini were the secret apartment, with difficult and protected access, and a decorative apparatus that, before the restorations of the 2000s, was hidden by superfetations and very fragmented. The Camerini were one of the most complete and celebrated decorative ensembles of the Renaissance, on a par with Federico da Montefeltro’s studiolo in Urbino: created to please the Duke’s refined taste-the Este court was not among the most powerful but certainly among the most cultured of the Italian Renaissance-they were built and decorated with precious and richly worked materials. Titian, Dosso Dossi, Gianbellino worked on the pictorial decorations on canvas. Then there was the famous Camerino of marbles, for which the Duke called the sculptor Antonio Lombardo to make bas-reliefs in white marble (now preserved in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg).
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