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Località: Largo Angelmaro - Geraci Siculo - Palermo

Engelmaro Tower

Torre di Engelmaro

The tower, erected in the first decades of the Norman conquest, è passed into history because it was the scene of some chivalric events known through the chronicle of Goffredo Malaterra and transcribed in the Sicilian vernacular by fra’ Simone da Lentini: in 1081 the great Count Roger had given Aldruda, widow of the valiant knight Serlone, in marriage to the militant Angelmaro. The latter, who was entitled for his wife’s dowry to the fourth part of the county of Geraci, was proud of the honor he had received, and attempted to circumvent the locals and transform his dwelling into a mighty tower, an emblem of his new social status; but this provoked the wrath of Roger, who besieged the village, dismissed Angelmaro and resumed full control of the site.

No other documentary sources are known about the’building, proving that in later centuries it played a marginal role with respect to the castle, while it was important in the phase of the Norman conquest of the city, until then in Arab hands.

The tower re-proposes the typological scheme of the donjon su motta, that is, of the bulwark on a hill (natural or artificial), widespread in Normandy and southern England and introduced in Sicily at the time of the conquest; among the best-known examples, the tower of Motta Sant’Anastasia, in eastern Sicily, shows precise dimensional and constructive similarities with the Geracese factory.

The building, now converted into a dwelling, appears as a severe and compact volume on four levels, the sides of which measure in plan about twelve by eight meters. On the ground floor on the eastern side è there is the entrance, while on the southern side two embrasures have been preserved, which from the inside have a deep splay intended for the archer; these two fronts overlook a narrow courtyard, closed to the east by a section of the wall that originally surrounded the tower and on which the pointed-arch access portal opens.

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