The castle, located on a rock overlooking the lake, is accessible via the "Siresina", the only gateway to the monument. Its construction is on three distinct levels or courtyards, accessible via drawbridges and stairs leaning against the walls. From the third courtyard you can admire the embattled keep, 31 m high and built in a posthumous period to that of the main building. On the top of the keep a formidable observatory overlooking the lake reveals a breathtaking view.
Castello di Malcesine History
The Scaligero castle with its tall dominant tower suspended on the lake is the symbol of Malcesine. Lombardic, was attacked and destroyed by the Franks in 590, after a short period of ruins and abandonment was rebuilt and in 806 hosted several times King Pipino, son of Charlemagne.
Following the conquests of the Hungarians towards the end of the first millennium, then it became a fief of the Bishop of Verona. With the domination of the Scaligera Lordships, military restructuring and adaptations were made and with them the name of 'Castello Scaligero'.
He remained under the Scaligeri from 1277 with Alberto della Scala and until 1378, with the fall of the lordship and the handover of the whole territory to the Visconti of Milan. From the first decade of the 1400s the dominant Venetian Serenissima prevailed and the castle, except in the short sixteenth century of the invasion of the imperial affiliates to the League of Cambrai, remained in Venetian hands until the fall of the Republic in 1797. After the short French season, in the nineteenth century it was held by the Austrians, who militarized the entire strategic province of Verona ('the quadrilateral' of scholastic memory), and engaged in renovations and static consolidation. Since 1902 the castle is a National Monument.
The village, a place already frequented since prehistoric times and later by Etruscan settlements, developed around the rocks surmounted by the imposing castle and still preserves the characteristics of a medieval town. The Palazzo dei Capitani, where a special institution called 'Gardesana dell'Acqua' with managerial duties, with a view of extremely broad autonomy and protection (and also from this point of view, can see the genius and the farsightedness of the Venetian domain), both of the waterway as it was and is the lake and of the road crossing on the Trentino border. Currently the castle houses the Museum of Natural History divided into two sections: del Garda and Baldo.