Castel Thun, A Home the Family Chose to Share

What if there was a place where you could walk through someone else's life, in a time entirely unknown to you, and still recognise the ordinary moments that make up any family's days, sitting down to dinner, the quiet of settling in for the night, the sound of children running down a corridor?

In one of my last trips to Italy I went to visit my uncle who lives in Trento, and he said he would be happy to take me to visit Castel Thun. I was so happy, as I had wanted to go for so many times but never quite got around to it. When we arrived, driving among the apple orchards and the gorgeous countryside of this part of Trentino, I could not believe my eyes when I looked up at the castle. I had seen so many photos, but no photo could capture what was actually in front of me.

Step inside Castel Thun and you feel as though you have been invited by the noble Thun family themselves, for a banquet or a family gathering. This castle, more than any other I have visited, still holds so much of the original belongings of the family that has inhabited these majestic walls for hundreds of years. Walking through rooms filled with the family's original divans, chests, cabinets, Empire-style bedside tables, and those beautiful majolica stoves that once warmed the rooms in winter, it felt more like walking into a family home gently paused in time than a museum.

In one of the rooms I saw a long table set with porcelain dishes and period glassware, as if the family had just stepped away. The walls were lined with portraits, generations of Thuns looking out in their formal clothes, alongside landscapes, still lifes, and religious and mythological scenes.

The Two Kitchens

One of the most striking spaces for me was not a grand hall at all, but the two kitchens, since together they tell the story of how daily life in this castle actually changed over the centuries.

The Cucina Vecchia is the old, medieval kitchen, and standing in it you understand immediately why it needed to be so large. A great hearth dominates the room beneath its own imposing hood, blackened stone reaching up into a low, soot-darkened vault, with stone sinks carved directly into the walls themselves, and the period pots, pans, and utensils still sitting there as though the cook had only just stepped out. Copper and pewter cauldrons hang from their chains above the fire, ready as though someone might yet come to light it, firewood is stacked beneath the mantel, split logs waiting their turn, and a long roasting fork leans against the stone. A stone trough sits nearby, worn smooth by centuries of use.

Connected to it is the Tinello, the servants' dining room, lined in wood and warmed by its own masonry stove, furnished with pieces from the Thun family's own collection, and a small collection of pewter catching the light softly rather than gleaming. Above the table hangs the strangest and most memorable thing I saw in this whole castle, a carved wooden figure of a woman with a mermaid's tail, holding a scroll, suspended from the ceiling on chains and antlers, doing the ordinary work of a chandelier while looking like something out of a folk tale. A short walk further, in another part of the service wing, I found the bread oven and the pistoria, where flour was once stored and dough prepared, one more quiet reminder of just how self-sufficient a castle like this had to be to survive.

Then the Cucina Nuova is an entirely different atmosphere altogether, and I found the shift between the two genuinely striking. This kitchen was used in the early twentieth century by the Bohemian branch of the Thun family, and everything about it feels more modern and domestic, white-lacquered wooden sideboards and tables standing in place of the old open hearth, a proper cast iron range with a copper flue rising into the vault, two copper pots still sitting on its hob. A rack of pewter plates lines one wall, a row of iron keys hangs from hooks nearby, and cupboards in soft, worn cream hold glassware and platters behind glass doors. Standing between the two kitchens, I could almost feel the centuries shift beneath my feet, from the smoke and bustle of that old medieval hearth to the quieter, more ordered world of the early nineteen hundreds, both still sitting inside the very same family home.

Now, for anyone who knows me, if there is something that fascinates me it is old kitchens. I do believe the kitchen is the heart of a home, even if that home belongs to aristocratic people. Even the richest people still needed food prepared with tools that, if not the same, were at least similar to those we ordinary people used. As I looked around, I could see objects that felt familiar, some that even my grandparents owned and used in their own kitchen, the paiolo, the typical pot for cooking polenta over the fire, the pestle and mortar, and the same kind of pewter plates once used to serve food at the table. The new kitchen held a stove much like my nonni's, although theirs was of course far smaller, but I could remember the heat coming off it and the smell of wood burning, as clearly as if I were standing in their kitchen rather than a castle's.

The Bishop's Room

The Bishop's Room, the Stanza del Vescovo, is entirely lined in cirmolo pine, its coffered ceiling carved and warm against yellow walls, a deep red canopy bed with a gold crown motif standing at its centre, a portrait watching from the wall nearby. It takes its name from Sigismondo Alfonso Thun, who served as prince-bishop of both Bressanone and Trento in the seventeenth century.

Stepping into this room was an incredible experience, not only for thinking about who had once slept there, but for the sheer detail of the carved wood across the ceiling and panels. My uncle had told me about this room before we arrived, since he had visited the castle himself in the past, and he carefully explained the types of wood used, especially cirmolo, still one of the favourite woods for furnishing mountain homes today, and known, as I noticed for myself, for holding a faint scent even centuries on.

The Family Chapel

It feels fitting that a family who could count a prince-bishop among its own should also have kept their own chapel just steps away. A long corridor from the entrance hall leads there, dedicated to Saint George and blessed in 1504, not long after the Thun family had finished a major expansion of the castle spanning the late fourteen hundreds into the early fifteen hundreds. Every surface inside, walls and the vaulted ceiling alike, carries sacred paintings in the late Gothic style. I am always fascinated by these small chapels inside private residences and castles, it reminds you of the importance of religion in those times, not only because of their existence but also because of the care and expense that went into decorating such spaces.

The Carriage Gallery

By the time you leave the main house and step into what was once the castle's stables, you have already spent so long inside the Thun family's world that walking back out into the daylight feels like its own small event. The gallery is a long stone corridor with a vaulted ceiling, the ash and mineral colour of old plaster, cool even in a photograph.

Inside, you are presented with a whole collection of sleighs and coaches, and as you walk among them there is a feeling that at any moment someone will walk in and offer you a lift back home. Among them was a horse-drawn sled, and I could easily imagine it gliding across the snow-covered terrain surrounding the castle in winter, carrying the family somewhere out into that white, silent landscape. The carriages line both sides of a raised wooden walkway, their wheels the real presence in the room, tall, spoked, some rimmed in deep red, the varnished black bodies catching what little light reaches this far into the stone. A small sign reading Carrozze Sportive, sporting carriages, sits near the entrance, and the whole space has the hush of somewhere built for movement that has been perfectly still for a very long time.

And it is here, right at the end, that the feeling of the whole visit crystallises. You no longer feel like a tourist working through a checklist of rooms, but a guest who has simply been allowed to wander through a home the Thun family has chosen to share, and as you step back out through the gate, some part of you almost expects to find a coachman still waiting there, ready to take you home after visiting the family.

If a castle like this has you already picturing your own day among these hills, working out which ones you could reasonably fit together and where you would need to base yourself, that is exactly the kind of thing I am building next. More on that soon.