Courtyard of Castello del Matinale

The castle of Matinale, or castle of Rudovaco, is a castle of Cancello, a fraction of the municipality of San Felice a Cancello, in the province of Caserta. It stands on an elevation overlooking the entrance to the Suessola valley. The construction of the castle of Matinale is attributed to Tommaso II d'Aquino, count of Acerra, on the occasion of his wedding with Margherita di Svevia, illegitimate daughter of Emperor Frederick II, a wedding which took place before 1247. The bride's dowry included the fiefdom di Suessola, to which the Cancello hamlet also belonged. According to local tradition, an original Lombard fortification of the ninth century would have been the work of a certain Rudovaco and would have passed on to his death to the Count of Acerra, Cullezio. He wanted to join his castle of Acerra to that of Cancello with an underground path, causing the ruin of the western side and was unable to restore it following his death in battle. The castle was later restored or rebuilt by the Norman Ramperto and again by the Mattaloni counts in the 12th century. The castle hosted the kings of Sicily Guglielmo il Malo (1131-1166) and Manfredi di Svevia (1232-1266) and the Dukes of Rebursa and again, in the Angevin period, King Ladislao I and the Carafa in the Aragonese period. In the 15th century it was abandoned, having lost its military function. It was the seat of an inn and probably housed an archpriest church dedicated to St. Thomas the Apostle. In 1799 the French general Jean Étienne Championnet established his headquarters there and later became a den of brigands. It was donated at the beginning of the twentieth century by the D'Aquino family, princes of Caramanico, to the baron Giovanni Barracco. During the Second World War it hosted the allied command in 1943.