Knights Templar

Xploration date 19/11/2023
In the countryside of a north Italian farming hamlet lies a roofless castle with a past beloning to none other than the Knights Templar.

Located in the countryside of Murello, close to the municipal boundaries of Racconigi, in the province of Cuneo (north Italy), is Bonavalle castle, an imposing building with a quadrangular plan. It amazes with the majesty of the main southfacing façade characterized by a raised central body.

What is also striking when observing the castle is the presence of cylindrical corner towers: two larger ones protecting the main entrance, dating back to the oldest core of the building, and two hanging, more slender turrets, on the north façade.

The castle was never permanently inhabited by lords, not even by the family that at the end of the 18th century managed to centralize the entirety of the shares to itself, ousting the Balbos, i.e. the Turinese Counts Turinetti, already promoters of the seventeenth-century construction site.

Another element of interest is of a historical nature, because Bonavalle, which became an independent fief at a certain time, initially shared the destiny of the fief of Murello, which at the beginning of the twelfth century was part of the marquisate of Busca, and then passed to the Knights Templar, who purchased extensive land properties. They had a church and a castle erected on site.

The castle of Bonavalle and its agricultural properties remained in the hands of the Turinetti counts until the first two decades of the twentieth century, when it was purchased by the painter Giuseppe Augusto Levis, a pupil of Lorenzo Delleani, who intended to make the castle his residence.

After the death of Levis and his wife, who had retained the usufruct over the property, Bonavalle castle became devoid of maintenance and went into a slow but inexorable decline, until it was reduced to a state of ruins, aggravated by the roof’s collapse.