Abstract:
This contribute highlights the main architectural aspects and building issues of the
Federician architecture, by which we specifically mean all those constructions - most
exclusively military and civil - Frederick II of Swabian had built in a very short period,
from 1220 to 1250, in order to implement the plan of strengthening military infrastructures in
the Kingdom of Sicily. Architecture and engineering under Frederick II comes out from a
unique and original mixture of different cultures and experiences coming from all the different
Mediterranean regions but coexisting in the southern Italy, from Sicilian Saracens to Nordic
Normans, from Cistercian monks to minority groups of Greeks and Byzantines. This study
analyses the constituent structure of all Frederick's castles realized by fundaments, that is
to say all those castles which successfully express the rational architectonic values typical of
the Federician architecture - architectonic-stereotomic stairs included - and tries to encode
and understand the processes carried out for realizing projects and constructions from the plan
to the realization of the single stony voussoirs.
