Laurenzana castle

Last updated April 17, 2019

Laurenzana castle (Italian : Castello di Laurenzana) is a former 12-13th-century castle, now in dilapidated state, standing in a rocky outcrop above the town of Laurenzana in the Basilicata region of Italy.^[1]

Italian is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family. Italian, together with Sardinian, is by most measures the closest language to Vulgar Latin of the Romance languages. Italian is an official language in Italy, Switzerland, San Marino and Vatican City. It has an official minority status in western Istria. It formerly had official status in Albania, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro (Kotor) and Greece, and is generally understood in Corsica and Savoie. It also used to be an official language in the former Italian East Africa and Italian North Africa, where it plays a significant role in various sectors. Italian is also spoken by large expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. In spite of not existing any Italian community in their respective national territories and of not being spoken at any level, Italian is included de jure, but not de facto, between the recognized minority languages of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Romania. Many speakers of Italian are native bilinguals of both standardized Italian and other regional languages.

Laurenzana is a town and comune in the province of Potenza, in the region of Basilicata. It rises on a spur between the torre Camastro and the wood surrounding the Serrapotamo valley.

Basilicata, also known by its ancient name Lucania, is a region in Southern Italy, bordering on Campania to the west, Apulia (Puglia) to the north and east, and Calabria to the south. It also has two coastlines: a 30-km stretch on the Tyrrhenian Sea between Campania and Calabria, and a longer coastline along the Gulf of Taranto between Calabria and Apulia. The region can be thought of as the "instep" of Italy, with Calabria functioning as the "toe" and Apulia the "heel". The region covers about 10,000 km² (3,900 sq mi) and in 2010 had a population slightly under 600,000. The regional capital is Potenza. The region is divided into two provinces: Potenza and Matera.

History

The outline of the castle today was built by feudatories of the Norman ruler, Guglielmo, in 1150, who built atop a Lombard fortress. The castle was ceded to make a hermitage for Basilian monks. For a time, it was occupied by Muslim forces from Africa. By the middle of the 13th century, the castle was occupied by the Swabian rulers, then the Angevins, then Aragonese. After 1454, it became feudal property of a series of families. In 1483, the owner, Raimondo Orsini Del Balzo, began converting it into a residence. Such work continued in 1606 under Gaetani D'Aragona It then passed to the families of the Dukes of Belgioioso, who owned it till the early 1800s.^[2]

Basilian monks are monks who follow the rule of Saint Basil the Great, bishop of Caesarea (330–379). The monastic rules and institutes of St. Basil are important because their reconstruction of monastic life remains the basis for most Eastern Orthodox and some Greek Catholic monasticism. Saint Benedict of Nursia, who fulfilled much the same function in the West, took his Regula Benedicti from the writings of St. Basil and other earlier church fathers. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, monks do not generally call themselves "Basilians", while the Greek Catholics do. Thus the expression "Basilian monk" almost always refers to religious of those Eastern Catholic Churches which follow the Byzantine Rite.

The Crown of Aragon was a composite monarchy, also nowadays referred to as a confederation of individual polities or kingdoms ruled by one king, with a personal and dynastic union of the Kingdom of Aragon and the County of Barcelona. At the height of its power in the 14th and 15th centuries, the Crown of Aragon was a thalassocracy controlling a large portion of present-day eastern Spain, parts of what is now southern France, and a Mediterranean "empire" which included the Balearic Islands, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, Malta, Southern Italy and parts of Greece. The component realms of the Crown were not united politically except at the level of the king, who ruled over each autonomous polity according to its own laws, raising funds under each tax structure, dealing separately with each Corts or Cortes. Put in contemporary terms, it has sometimes been considered that the different lands of the Crown of Aragon functioned more as a confederation than as a single kingdom. In this sense, the larger Crown of Aragon must not be confused with one of its constituent parts, the Kingdom of Aragon, from which it takes its name.

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References

↑ Associazione Promozione Basilicata.
↑ Comune of Laurenzana, entry on castle.

Coordinates: 40°27′39″N15°58′22″E / 40.4607°N 15.9729°E / 40.4607; 15.9729

Geographic coordinate system Coordinate system

A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are often chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position and two or three of the numbers represent a horizontal position; alternatively, a geographic position may be expressed in a combined three-dimensional Cartesian vector. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation. To specify a location on a plane requires a map projection.

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[1] Associazione Promozione Basilicata.

[2] Comune of Laurenzana, entry on castle.