Rocca (architecture)

Rocca (architecture)

Rocca (literally: "rock") is an Italian term meaning a high, fortifiable stronghold, usually located in smaller towns, beneath or on which the village or town clustered, within which its inhabitants might take refuge at times of trouble; under its owners' patronage the settlement might hope to find prosperity in better times. A rocca might in reality be no grander than a fortified farmhouse. A more extensive rocca would be referred to as a castello.

The rocca in Roman times would more likely be a site of a venerable cult than a dwelling, like the highplace of Athens, its Acropolis. Though the earliest documentation is not often earlier than the eleventh century, it was during the Lombard times that farming communities, which had presented a Roman pattern of loosely distributed farmsteads or self-sufficient villas, moved from their traditional places on the fringes of the best arable lands in river bottoms, where they were dangerously available from the Roman roads, to defensive positions, such as had once been occupied by Etruscan settlements, before the settled conditions of the Pax Romana. "At Falerii", J.B. Ward-Perkins notes, "the inhabitants simply transferred their city back from its Roman site on the open plateau to the old cliff-top site of Falerii Veteres, to which they gave the significant name of Civita Castellana, or "the Fortress City"; just as in antiquity, security was once again the basic consideration." Similarly, in Greek-speaking Calabria, the inhabitants of Paestum finally abandoned their town after raids by Saracens and moved a few miles to the top of a cliff, calling the new settlement Agropoli (ie "acropolis"). Where such fortress-villages were sited at the end of a ridge, protected on three sides by steep, cliff-like escarpments, the rocca was often sited to control the narrow access along the headland's spine.

In the immediate neighborhood, La Rocca simply designates the local castellated high place.