Grandiose building built on the tallest ledge of the mountain volterrano, where the acropolis of the city etrusca and Roman it rose, one of the most formidable piazzefortis that the Renaissance architecture has built in Italy, you/he/she is constituted by two bodies of factory, the fourteenth-century Old Fortress and the fifteenth-century Fortress New, united together from a double curtain, crowned by a gallery supported by hanging (bertesche) bows, the so-called Walk of Watch, while to the inside form a vast square.
The Old Fortress near Door to Flints, includes parts of a more ancient fortification, I made visible from recent restaurations and the tower of form semiellittica, said vulgarly the Female, attributed to the Duke of Athens.
The Fortress New was made to raise from Lawrence the Magnificent one, on the place where the Building of the Bishops existed, destroyed by the Florentines in 1472. You/he/she is constituted by ample square of stone bench, whose angles finish in circular ramparts, to the center the Tower of the Mastio raises him, from which takes the name the whole Fortitude, and of which is the most monumental part. Built to military use, since the beginning you/he/she was used as political jail; in his/her cells they passed both the opponents of the Physicians, are the patriots of our Risorgimento Nazionale.