Porta Castello
Historic site · Borgo, Italy
A vanished gate, and a name commonly attached to the wrong object. What visitors photograph at the corner of via di Porta Castello and Borgo Sant'Angelo is not the gate: Italian Wikipedia records it as a pair of arches cut through the wall of the Passetto for traffic, one by Pius IV and one by the Comune di Roma.
History
The gate itself stood in the stretch of wall Pius IV added to the Civitas Leonina around 1563, at what is now the junction of via di Porta Castello, via delle Fosse di Castello and via Giovanni Vitelleschi. It was closed in 1798, and the wall from piazza Risorgimento to Castel Sant'Angelo, with both its gates, was demolished in the late-nineteenth-century works. Italian Wikipedia records that it was probably twin to Porta Angelica, carrying the same Pius IV arms and inscriptions — Piale, writing in 1828, recorded «PIUS IIII. PONT. MAX. PORTAM NOVAM ET MOENIA A FUNDAMENTIS EREXIT» on both — and that Cola di Rienzo entered Rome in triumph through it on 1 August 1354.
Visit
More in Borgo
- Porta Santo Spirito · Historic site
- Via della Conciliazione · Historic site
- Arcispedale di Santo Spirito in Saxia · Historic site
- Auditorium Conciliazione · Theater
- Basilica di Santa Maria in Traspontina · Historic site
- Borgo Pio · Historic site
- Borgo Santo Spirito · Historic site
- Cappella di San Francesco Borgia · Historic site