Glamoroso!
(14) The Madness Of Owning A Haunted Mansion
A castle,’ says Baron Andrea Franchetti, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses as he sprawls in a sky-blue deck chair in front of his private castello in the Grödner Valley, ‘is a poetic adventure.’ And Reinhold Messner, legendary mountaineer and lord of Juval Castle in the Vinschgau, ‘had dreamed of a castle since he was a small boy’. When, after years of expeditions, he could no longer bear confined spaces, his own castle seemed to him the stone-carved motto of his life: dreams are not enough — you must risk everything to make them real’.
Episode 1 (“Castle Lords”) tells the more glamorous, gilded castle fairy tales, including:
- The ghosts of Chillingham Castle, England’s most haunted castle, where Sir Humphry Wakefield is stalked at night by the ‘Green Lady’, and paranormal investigators from the Ghost Research Foundation International search the corridors for cold spots.
- Countess Katrin Goess-Enzenberg, whose mother burst into tears when her daughter announced she would be moving into the (then still unrestored) Schloss Tratzberg in Tyrol as the new Countess — so daunting did the fate of a castle mistress seem to her.
- Young Baron Andrea Franchetti, who not only produces the most expensive wine in Italy by some margin on his Tuscan estate, but keeps as a private passion project the strictly private, fairy-tale Fischburg in the Grödner Valley in the Dolomites — built by the family of the medieval poet Oswald von Wolkenstein for his children. Franchetti occasionally suffers from the spirit of Peter Pan that haunts the walls of his oversized ‘toy castle’, where in winter it is so bitterly cold that ‘when it’s minus 10 outside, it’s minus 20 inside’, as Franchetti puts it.
- The elegant wife of Marquis Charles-André de Brissac, who confesses she does not like to stay alone at the fairy-tale Château de Brissac on the Loire — on account of the ghostly women’s screams she occasionally hears. The Marquis responds drily: ‘I sometimes hear someone screaming too, but it’s always my wife.’
- Balgonie Castle, the only self-made castle in Scotland, restored by hand by its owners — who are never seen without their kilts — with the exception of one wing, which for financial reasons still slumbers on as a ruin, said to be haunted by a recurring ‘Green Lady’.
- Deep Purple guitar legend Ritchie Blackmore (‘Smoke on the Water’), who for years has performed exclusively in medieval costume and exclusively in castles with his band Blackmore’s Night, celebrating medieval music as a kind of musical mass before audiences dressed in kind. One such venue is Schloss Waldeck on the Edersee.
- Count Girolamo Marcello, whose great-grandmother Andriana taps him on the shoulder whenever he fails to conduct himself with appropriate decorum in his Venetian Palazzo Mora Marcello behind the Canal Grande.
Episode 1 (“Castle Lords”) tells the more glamorous, gilded castle fairy tales, including:
- The ghosts of Chillingham Castle, England’s most haunted castle, where Sir Humphry Wakefield is stalked at night by the ‘Green Lady’, and paranormal investigators from the Ghost Research Foundation International search the corridors for cold spots.
- Countess Katrin Goess-Enzenberg, whose mother burst into tears when her daughter announced she would be moving into the (then still unrestored) Schloss Tratzberg in Tyrol as the new Countess — so daunting did the fate of a castle mistress seem to her.
- Young Baron Andrea Franchetti, who not only produces the most expensive wine in Italy by some margin on his Tuscan estate, but keeps as a private passion project the strictly private, fairy-tale Fischburg in the Grödner Valley in the Dolomites — built by the family of the medieval poet Oswald von Wolkenstein for his children. Franchetti occasionally suffers from the spirit of Peter Pan that haunts the walls of his oversized ‘toy castle’, where in winter it is so bitterly cold that ‘when it’s minus 10 outside, it’s minus 20 inside’, as Franchetti puts it.
- The elegant wife of Marquis Charles-André de Brissac, who confesses she does not like to stay alone at the fairy-tale Château de Brissac on the Loire — on account of the ghostly women’s screams she occasionally hears. The Marquis responds drily: ‘I sometimes hear someone screaming too, but it’s always my wife.’
- Balgonie Castle, the only self-made castle in Scotland, restored by hand by its owners — who are never seen without their kilts — with the exception of one wing, which for financial reasons still slumbers on as a ruin, said to be haunted by a recurring ‘Green Lady’.
- Deep Purple guitar legend Ritchie Blackmore (‘Smoke on the Water’), who for years has performed exclusively in medieval costume and exclusively in castles with his band Blackmore’s Night, celebrating medieval music as a kind of musical mass before audiences dressed in kind. One such venue is Schloss Waldeck on the Edersee.
- Count Girolamo Marcello, whose great-grandmother Andriana taps him on the shoulder whenever he fails to conduct himself with appropriate decorum in his Venetian Palazzo Mora Marcello behind the Canal Grande.
Credits
