This castle was built in 1154 and most probably the name Strozzavolpe comes from Scoriavolpe. Here it was built by Benuccio da Salimbeni and then sold to the Florentine Adimari family.
Looking up from the Cassia or from the freeway you can’t help but notice its largely authentic and original walls, then we see the drawbridge like a real medieval castle and the majestic arch made of stones. Along the perimeter there are large buildings built at a time certainly later than the castle but of high historical value. The master tells us various stories that have formed the myth of chokes, legends, bloody battles and romantic stories. But even if the masters do not claim of real presences of spirits they certainly do not deny the strange legends that have formed around this castle. One tells of a spectre of a fox that wanders around the castle on full moon nights. The fault belongs to a certain Bonifazio Duke and Marquis of Tuscany, who insisted on building this castle despite the fact that there was a strange fox in the vicinity that made even the bravest knights flee. So began a real hunt for the fox, but no one was able to see it since it took advantage of even the most skilled hunters by being seen and hiding immediately. But the strangest thing is that it would seem that the fox kept its hunters away by spitting fire and flames from its mouth. The prince, fed up with the fox, decides to play cunningly, so he hides in the woods and manages to catch it with a trap, choking it with a string. But the prince’s satisfaction ended when the court magician told him that the castle would last as long as the fox’s body. So the prince had the fox’s body embalmed by pouring into it a large quantity of molten gold, hiding it in a secret place, perhaps the foundations of the castle. The prince also had three knights guard the precious treasure, who would guard the fox for the rest of their lives. It happens at the end of our century that a mason, working with a pickaxe, finds the rich booty, but he can’t even rejoice because at that very moment the three knights came out and beat him and hid the fox in another place. Even today, with the nights of full moon, you can see a large fox wandering around the place ending up hiding in the moat of the castle, now dried up. Many studies have been carried out on animals, because it would seem that they have something more than humans. In fact it seems that a dog can see spirits and warn natural catastrophes before they happen. Once it was found a dog that seemed to want to bite his master, dead, only biting the air but looking at a fixed point in the void. It would seem that the choking fox, pardon the pun, personifies the undoubted role of constant defense of the castle. The central building of the castle is embellished with relics from a remote era, which still furnish the vast rooms. As the "red room" where Cassandra Franceschi was found in the sweet company of a page of her husband Giannozzo da Capparello. Her husband made sure that they were entertained as long as possible by walling them up alive in the wall. The moans can be heard everywhere, but especially in the same room where the two unfortunates were walled up alive. A presence defined as "continuous and noticeable beyond the sighs, you understand as soon as you enter that there is something or someone in the red room". The evidence of being in front of an unredeemed spirit is very clear. The agitation of the ghost is often connected to a crime, to a bad action or to an epilogue certainly not of a serene old age, explainable with the evident opposition to a predetermined destiny. The unfaithful Cassandra is unable to atone for the event, her presence shows that the time that has passed was not sufficient for the repose of death. Parapsychological redemption has little to do with Christian praxis, forgiveness could not avoid what was determined by the events of the "red room", the personified projection, the externalization of the psychic contents of a strong character as Cassandra proves to have. But strozzavolpe contains other places, outside the walls, containing legends, such as the "house of the nuns and monks" where you can hear the sound of chains and deaf blows on the walls. It would seem that the wandering spirits are possessed, and in order to make themselves heard, they only make noise through walls, metal, glass or voices. This is all part of the thesis that it would seem that the spirits want to communicate with living beings, perhaps to tell their story so that someone can rescue them from their bloody position. But the stories of this castle have never ended, such as the two discoveries made by a team of masons in 1970, a team of workers was called and they got busy with chisels, hammers and other tools. But one day two discoveries were made: a blackbird appeared strangely freshly walled and at the same time it was noted that the worker who worked in that area had strangely disappeared. After undoing the blackbird’s masonry, they found an empty terracotta jar and, inside a cane, a burnt parchment where the story of a buried treasure was written in Gothic characters. After other investigations, they learn that the worker had suddenly left with his family for an unknown destination. No one knew anything about it anymore, but everyone imagined that he was enjoying, somewhere, the contents of the ancient jar".
