Rocca Maggiore can be seen from anywhere in the valley, at any distance. It overlooks the Assisi hill, surrounded by trees that at night, in contrast with the city lights, form a dark strip around it, making the Rocca look like it is floating in the air. As we get closer its austere and severe magnitude reminds us that Assisi, the city of peace and spirituality, has a dark past made of wars, popular uprisings, famine, and pestilence.
The first evidence dates back to the XII Century, when the Archbishop of Magonza realised the strategical value of such location and there he built Federico Barbarossa’s fortress to consolidate the power of the emperor against the autonomous communes that were sprouting everywhere in Central Italy. The Rocca was also home to Frederick II – the greatest and most enlightened Emperor of the Germanic race – during his infancy. Frederick was only four years old when the Assisians, urged by Pope Innocent III, revolted to free city from the “foreign” dominator.
For almost a century the blood and memory of those events stained the ruins of the Rocca, partly destroyed and abandoned. The communal administrative power moved downhill, where today we have the Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo (Palace of the People’s Captain) and Torre Civica (Civic Tower), until a new threat suddenly appeared. This time the peril was coming from East, in the person of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, with his Ghibelline allies that included an Assisian, Muzio Brancaleoni, whose fellow citizens would remember as one of the shrewdest and most ruthless warlords of Assisi. Muzio joined the Gihibelline alliance along with the Montefeltro, Visconti, the lords of Milan, and the Scaligeri, lords of Verona that wanted Assisi to be a stronghold to counter the powerful and Guelph Perugia. It is the beginning of the XIV century and the old rivalry between Assisi and Perugia reaches its peak of violence. In order to carry on his expensive struggle with the Perugians, Muzio performs the most unspeakable acts, such as pillaging and executions and – above all – he sells the treasure of the Basilica of Saint Francis that gets him excommunicated and forever hated by his fellow citizens.
Muzio surrenders to the Pope, but the Rocca and Assisi in general are in ruins. After a few decades of peace, just enough time to rebuild, the tensions between Guelphs and Ghibellines grow again and the Spanish Cardinal and Warlord Egidio Albornoz, who – like almost all men of Church at the time – was a much finer connoisseur of war rather than peace, included the Rocca in his gargantuan work of fortification of the papal territories. Next to the fortresses that were built from scratch, including the imposing Rocca Albornoziana in Spoleto, he ordered that the old fortresses had to be renovated. The Assisi city walls were fortified and, not far from the Rocca, a second fortification was erected, the Rocca Minore or Rocchicciola. Apparently it was connected to her big sister through a long tunnel inside the walls.
Thanks to these works Assisi became an even more strategical and sought-after destination for mercenaries and warlords. The Albornoziano defence system collapsed a century later under the bludgeonings of Niccolò Piccinino, the Perugian butcher who became one of the greatest Captains of Fortune of his time. His exploits were even praised by Lonardo da Vinci. Also thanks to the help of a treasonous friar, who pointed him to a secret passage through the walls via the old Roman aqueduct, in 1442 Piccinino laid siege to Assisi, which in the meantime had become Ghibelline again under the protection of Alessandro Sforza lord of Pesaro. The records say that Niccolò, whose finest quality sure weren’t benevolence and compassion, was so besotted with the city’s beauty that he refused 15,000 Florins by the Commune of Perugia to raze it to the ground and put an end to the rivalry once and for all. Struggles and sieges continued rather regularly, throughout the following century, to then gradually diminish as the Church consolidated its power on the peninsula and Assisi lost its strategical position on the territory. The last restyling of the Rocca was ordered by Pope Paul III in 1535, another prelate with a penchant for conquering. As he did not trust the unruly Umbrian citizens, Paul III reinforced the existing towers and built the circular keep that we see from the top of the slope running from Porta Perlici: only a prelude to his grandiose work of defensive architecture in Umbria: the Rocca Paolina.
In later years the Rocca gradually lost its protective function. At first it was the residence of the castellans appointed to supervise the territory; later it became a prison and then a warehouse.
The inside of the Rocca can be visited. There are very few objects, but through its bare walls, embrasures and narrow passages, it is still possible to imagine all the pain and suffering that this place of war had seen.