Castello di Prampero is a medieval castle located in the municipality of Magno in Riviera, in the Province of Udine. This ancient castle, according to some scholars, arises where, before its construction, there was a lookout for the control of the important Via Julia Augusta, road that from Aquileia left towards Norico, that is Germany. Rebuilt in the 12th century, it belonged first to the lords of Pramberg, a family of German descent, while the lords of Gemona (1227) were later subdued, who took the title of lords and then Counts of Prampero.
Castello di Prampero History
Its history began in 1025, when the patriarch of Aquileia Poppone gave a fief to a hill and gave permission to the feudal lord from the city of Augsburg in Bavaria to build a castle for the strategic and economic development of the possessions entrusted to him within the strengthening of the Holy Roman Empire in Italy. From the towers the streets below were dominated, collecting the tolls necessary for the maintenance of the roads, and they monitored the agricultural works; the internal court was used to store utensils and various products.
After Corrado II granted the inheritance of the minor feuds (1037), the castle of Prampero and the hill belonged to the homonymous family stump divided into several branches, one half as a patrimonial asset, the other under the feudal regime.
The building itself of the castle, expanding itself, became the residence of the consortes and at the same time the headquarters of the justice, that is of the male firstborn invested by the patriarch (and later by the Venetian government) of the renewal of the feud. This structure remained until the abolition of the legal institution of the feud by the Italian State (1870). It was then that the castle and the hill were bought by the brothers Antonino and Ottaviano di Prampero, thus becoming a private asset of the historic family, with uninterrupted genealogy from its origins.
The castle does not bear signs of human destruction. Two instead were the earthquakes that almost completely destroyed the structures of the district of Prampero (1511 and 1976), but over time in this area there were other violent and repeated seismic disasters between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. The chronicles do not mention the castle among the then damaged property, but it is the building itself that bears traces of rebuilding due to the earthquakes described, after the earthquake of 1511, the family archive of Prampero attests that the restoration works engaged the consortes of Prampero throughout the sixteenth century, with the decisive financial contribution of Gio Gioseffo (1518-1595), Fulvio (1554-1602) and Gio Francesco (1530-1615).
Excluding the Tarcento tower that was not rebuilt and the loggia to the west that did not exist before the castle was apparently rebuilt without particular modernization, in compliance with the previous building principles, also respected in the building of the new body with the external staircase (1595). The manor then took the aspect that it maintained until the collapse of 1976, when the very serious earthquake damaged it deeply. Immediately after the earthquake, unfortunately the efforts were concentrated only on the rebuilding of the nearby church of Santa Margherita, and only then was the massive restoration work undertaken to bring the ruins back to its ancient castle dignity.