Castello Estense, at the center of Ferrara, is a fortress and Renaissance landmark whose political meaning shifts sharply in the book’s account. Built after a popular uprising, it later embodied the city’s courtly and artistic prestige; in November 1920, socialist leaders used its historic rooms for a council meeting and banquet, turning a former seat of princely authority into a setting for proletarian celebration.

Foundation and Renaissance prominence

The castle’s first stone was laid on September 29, 1385, the feast of Saint Michael, who was regarded as the protector of gates and fortresses. Marquis Niccolò II d’Este commissioned it after a violent popular uprising in Ferrara in May of that year. Its origins thus joined the practical defense of power to a city marked by popular revolt.

Over the following two centuries, the castle became a major architectural, artistic, and urban achievement of the Renaissance. Its halls accommodated a celebrated court, helping make Ferrara—then an isolated settlement amid marshes—one of Europe’s prominent capitals. In the alabaster camerino, Alfonso I d’Este, husband of Lucrezia Borgia, assembled one of the earliest art collections described in the account.

A socialist meeting inside the castle

On November 3, 1920, after local elections gave the Socialist Party control of all 54 municipalities in the province, its leaders held their first council meeting in the Games Salon. The political change was made visible in the castle’s setting: men representing the farmers’ leagues and the Chamber of Labor gathered in rooms once associated with the Este rulers.

They then held a banquet in the Government Room. The account emphasizes the social symbolism of the meal as well as its location: the guests ate salama da sugo beneath a coffered wooden ceiling, and placed the castle’s doorkeeper, Ghelandi, at the head of the table, in the seat formerly belonging to the Renaissance prince. The gesture recast a space of courtly rank as a scene of working-class political assertion.

Political meaning

Castello Estense connects Ferrara’s layered history of revolt, princely rule, artistic prestige, and mass politics. Its walls do not simply provide a backdrop: the socialist gathering makes the former court a contested political space, where taking the honored seat and occupying the old halls give visible form to a new claim to authority. The contrast between Renaissance magnificence and the leaders’ deliberately proletarian banquet gives the episode its force.