Castello di Collalto

In 1898 a Leipzig writer named Rudolf Kleinpaul published a survey of what Europeans believed about their dead, and he filed the White Lady of Collalto under a heading that no retelling of her story has used since. The chapter is called Hausgeister künstlich gezüchtet: die Einmauerung, house spirits artificially bred, by immurement. Kleinpaul gathered a small gallery of castles whose resident ghost got there through a person sealed alive inside the masonry, and he put the north Italian castle of Collalto at the head of it. The chapter closes on her: so belebte das unglückliche Kammermädchen, die Weisse Dame von Collalto, grauenvoll das finstere Haus, “so the unfortunate chambermaid, the White Lady of Collalto, gave the dark house its horror.”

Every version of the legend turns on a mirror. The countess sits in front of it while her maid combs her hair. The count comes in to take his leave before riding off to war, and in the glass his wife watches him smile at the girl standing behind her chair. Kleinpaul calls the maid a blonde Venetian and the countess Johanna. In the version the family itself told in 1925 the two are called Bianca and Chiara. The scene is the same in both. The countess held her tongue until her husband was out of the castle, and then she had the girl imprisoned, and then walled up alive inside a tower.

The story hands Bianca two jobs and never joins them. She died as a punished servant, sealed in by a mistress who had decided she was guilty of something. She also became the household’s own spirit, staying in the walls of the castle and coming back to the family before a great joy or a great disaster.

Appearance

The sources describe Bianca by colour, and the colour carries the message. White means a wedding or a birth. A black veil across her head means a death or a ruin. The family tradition of 1925 keeps both forms and gives no features at all. Kleinpaul, writing twenty-seven years before that interview, added one detail the later accounts dropped: his maid was blonde.

The two-colour system is older than the Collaltos and wider than the Veneto. Europe’s White Ladies all work this way, and the best-documented of them is a Bohemian noblewoman, Perchta of Rožmberk. Her ghost is reported at the Rožmberk castles across South Bohemia, and her omen system is as precise as Bianca’s: white gloves mean good fortune, black gloves foreshadow a death. The Woman in White entry follows that figure across the continent, from the burial mounds of Neolithic Drenthe to the balconies of Bohemian castles.

Function

Bianca announces. That is the whole of her recorded activity, and the family tradition is exact about the terms.

Countess Maria di Collalto gave the account to the Austrian newspaper Neues Wiener Journal in May 1925, and she described what her relatives claimed to have seen. Her grandfather, Prince Solms, said he saw Bianca at the castle of Pirnitz in Moravia on the day he asked for the hand of the woman he married. Bianca appeared at Pirnitz again when Maria’s brother Rambaldo died.

Maria added one further detail: nobody in the family reported seeing Bianca during the First World War, the years that wrecked their estates and the surrounding Piave front.

Her nearest relative in the record is Irish. The banshee attaches to a family rather than to a building, and she arrives as a death notice with no alternative outcome attached. Bianca carries a forecast instead, and the household learned to read it the way a farmer reads a sky.

The count who never existed

Every published version of the legend names a count of Collalto and a wife from the da Camino of Ceneda. The names disagree with each other, and none of them agrees with the record.

In the 1925 interview the pair are Tolberto di Collalto and Chiara da Camino. Kleinpaul, in 1898, gives Reimbalt VII and Countess Johanna. Francesco Dall’Ongaro, who printed the story in 1847 in the anthology Tradizioni italiane, made the castellan a da Camino. Pasquale Negri’s later version made her German.

The historical Tolberto da Camino belonged to the other family. He was born in February 1263, married Gaia da Camino in 1291, served as podestà of Treviso in 1298, and died in September 1317. The Treccani biographical dictionary is plain about where the two houses actually met: he and Gaia had one daughter, Chiara, and Chiara married Count Rambaldo di Collalto.

What the legend keeps is the right two families and the right marriage. It moves that marriage by a generation and swaps the bride and the groom. The alliance that ended the feud between the counts of Collalto and the da Camino was real, and Bianca’s story is told as if it were the wedding that sealed it.

There is one more reason the family’s own version cannot be checked. The Collalto archives were destroyed in the First World War, when the castles above Susegana were shelled by Italian artillery in 1917 and 1918. Whatever the house held on the thirteenth century went with the roofs.

The same gap reaches a second and stranger thread. Gaspara Stampa, the Venetian poet, addressed her love poems to a Count of Collalto, and the collection was printed in 1554, the year she died, by her sister Cassandra. Kleinpaul reports this, and in the same paragraph reports that Stampa died in 1559, five years late; the Venetian parish record gives 23 April 1554. Her love for Collaltino di Collalto is one of the best-documented affairs in sixteenth-century Italian poetry, and it belongs to the family whose ghost story has a jealousy murder at its centre.

Cross-Cultural Connections

The mirror scene has a documented afterlife in Germany, and it runs through the family’s own inheritance law. Kleinpaul reports that Rambaldo XIII, the Wallenstein field marshal who later served as imperial principal commissioner, made his testament at Alessandria on 8 April 1630 and settled his estates as a fideicommissum with a provision for the total extinction of the Collalto line. If the family died out, the property was to pass to the related princely house of Hohenzollern. The Hohenzollern keep a White Lady of their own, the figure the Prussian court called Kunigunde von Orlamünde, and she has been appearing at their residences since a sighting at Bayreuth in 1486. The Woman in White article traces both figures. Two houses joined by a clause in a will, each with a woman in white on the stairs.

The walled-up family is the other obvious neighbour, and the difference between the branches is worth holding onto. In the ballads of Skadar, in the Rozafa legend and at the bridge of Arta, masons seal a woman into a foundation so that the structure will stand. The building demands a life and gets one. Bianca’s wall was built for a different reason, and Rudolf Kleinpaul is the writer who noticed that the two logics sit close enough to blur. He devotes his chapter to immurement as a punishment, lists the Vestals who broke their vows and the monks and nuns who broke theirs, then turns around and argues that the same act was also a measure of utility, a method of creating a house spirit where none existed. He closes the Collalto passage with the maid still walking the corridors. Whether the family’s own spirit began as a sentence or as a foundation offering is the question his chapter leaves open, and the sources do not close it. The walled-up bride article follows the building-sacrifice branch from the Žumberak to the Bridge of Arta and into what excavation actually finds under old walls.

Čachtice Castle carries the punishment branch to its most famous case. Elizabeth Báthory was walled into a set of rooms in her own castle on 31 December 1610, and the popular retellings have pushed that judicial confinement toward the older image of a woman sealed inside masonry. Kleinpaul drew the same line Bianca’s story needs: the guilty were sealed in completely and left with bread and water, and he distinguishes them sharply from the recluses who chose the wall. Wiborada of St Gallen had herself sealed into a cell beside a Swiss abbey church with one small window, and the Orthodox tradition honours the same gesture in Avramije the Recluse. The room is the same in both cases, and only the person who chose it differs.

Modern Survival

The castle is a ruin with a tower. It was first recorded around 1110, served as a county seat from 1312 to 1806, and came apart under Italian artillery in 1917 and 1918, after Austro-German forces occupied it following the Battle of Caporetto. The Austro-Hungarian War Press Bureau photographed the wreckage in 1918, and the picture it made is the only view of the place from the years it was lost.

The story outlived the building. Since 2012 the commune and the local associations have run guided walks through the borgo on the Bianca route, timed to the antique market on the second Sunday of the month. A youth theatre group staged La vendetta di Aica in September 2001, and in August 2010 the Associazione Antica Fiera di Santa Lucia di Piave performed In Bianca tempore in the old village itself. Antonio Foltran’s posthumous book La leggenda di Bianca was presented at Collalto in April 2011, with the historical sections prepared by Antonio Menegon, and the composer Giorgio Susana and the librettist Nicola Bergamo turned the story into a musical drama for choir, orchestra and soloists in twelve scenes.

The core division remains fixed in each revival: white for an impending joy, black for a disaster.

Sources

• Rudolf Kleinpaul, Die Lebendigen und die Toten in Volksglauben, Religion und Sage. Leipzig, 1898. Chapter IV.3, ‘Hausgeister künstlich gezüchtet: die Einmauerung’, pp. 212-215.
• Countess Maria di Collalto, interview in the Neues Wiener Journal, May 1925. Reproduced in Italian in A. Menegon, Collalto, and in the account published by the Comune di Susegana.
• Josef Riedmann, ‘Camino, Tolberto da’, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 17. Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1974.
• Francesco Dall’Ongaro, ‘La donna Bianca dei Collalto’, in Tradizioni italiane per la prima volta raccolte in ciascuna provincia dell’Italia, ed. Angelo Brofferio. Turin, 1847.
• Gaspara Stampa, Rime di Madonna Gaspara Stampa. Venice, 1554 (published posthumously by her sister Cassandra).
• Castello San Salvatore, Susegana, official family site: ‘History and Family’, castellosansalvatore.it.
• Comune di Susegana, ‘Marca Storica’ information panel at the Castello di Collalto (recorded on site, 2022): the castle erected in 1110, county seat 1312 to 1806, destroyed 1917 to 1918.
• K.u.k. Kriegspressequartier, Lichtbildstelle Wien, photograph of the ruined Schloss Collalto, 1918. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.