Schifanoia Castle stands amidst centuries-old trees and fertile lands, near the town of Valfabbrica. The current name derives from schivar la noia, a toponym also used in other homes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to underline that these places were meant for vacation and rest. Built in the fourteenth century, the first records date back to 1377. With certainty in September 1486 the castle was owned by Bernardino Ranieri, and since the latter was very politically active in Perugia, always allied with the Degli Oddi family against the bloody battles with the Baglioni family, the castle suffered the political fate of its owner. Pillaged and half destroyed in 1480, it had the same fate in 1491, because a few evenings earlier Bernardino’s young son had entered Perugia in the dead of night, killing as many Baglioni partisans as he found. The reaction of the Perugian family was immediate, of course, who, arriving with over six hundred armed men, under the castle, unloaded two towers, and opened the walls of the fortress in several places, burned all the remainder. With the conquest of the Baglioni, the castle was abandoned by the Ranieri, who in the meantime had taken refuge in Urbino, and a quarter of a century passed before they were able to return. In the 16th century, with Filippo Ranieri, the destroyed castle was rebuilt, and various lands were added to the property, but a century later, in 1624, the property passed from the Ranieri family to the Della Penna, since Francesca, the last heir, married Captain Paolo Della Penna. In the 19th century it belonged to the Oddi-Baglioni family, and later it came to the Roman family of the Torlonia princes, who still own it today. Don Giulio Torlonia organized hunting trips on horseback there, in which many members of important families participated. Those were the years in which, in the summer, the Roman nobility loved to spend their holidays in their Umbrian estates. At the end of the 20th century they equipped the castle with a pipeline for drinking water, and, today, although uninhabited, it still appears majestic and imposing as it once was, with covered towers, an internal courtyard and large halls in the stately palace.