Bentivoglio Castle

The Bentivoglio Castle is a large, square-plan Renaissance building defined by its broad windows and a spacious, bright central courtyard. Built between fourteen seventy-five and fourteen eighty-one, it served as the Domus Jocunditatis, or House of Joy, for the powerful Bentivoglio family of Bologna. Giovanni the Second Bentivoglio commissioned this leisure residence at a strategic point where the Navile Canal met a local mill and an earlier fourteenth-century watchtower.