Sasso Corbaro (Switzerland)

It dominates the plain of Bellinzona 230 meters above the level of the city. Typical Sforza fortress, its wall masses are reduced to the essentiality of a geometric figure.
In the square courtyard enclosed between high walls grafted the keep the powerful shoulders of up to 4.70 meters thick, and the lookout tower. It was built by order of the Duke of Milan in 1479 in just over six months of work after the battle of Giornico. It is the engineer Benedetto Ferrini of Florence who died of the plague, on October 10 the same year. Its name comes from the hill on which it stands; during the Swiss rule it was called Unterwalden, and in 1818 St. Barbara.
From Bellinzona is also said to Cima Castello. This fortress, which was raised to better garantir the closure of the Ticino Valley, after 1798, left to itself, began to decay; would be reduced to a pile of rubble where the beginning of 1870, the State had not succumbed to a company that wanted to turn it into hotel, and a few years later, three of Bellinzona families who transformed it into a summer residence.
In 1919 he returned to the state which then restored by rebuilding, among other things, the ravelin, the entrance doors, the seventeenth-century chapel and well. There you can climb over good roads from the Castle of Montebello and Via Ospedale. It runs along the creek Dragonato and passes beneath the church of Our Lady of the Snows.
The view that you can enjoy is fantastic: it widens towards the north, up to the Riviera valley dominated by lace Claro, and from the south goes up to the basin of Lake Maggiore in the Italian territory. The castle and the restaurant are open to the public from April to October.