The castle rose during the Norman domination at the end of the XIth century and belonged to the Benedictine Abbey of S. Eufemia until the time of Emperor Frederick II. The emperor, who seems to have sojourned in Nicastro in August 1225, took the castle from the abbey in 1239. It was added to the list of Castra Exempla, which means it was placed in the registry of places subject directly to the authority of the crown, and it became one of the repositories of the state treasure. The tax revenues of the territorial district that comprehended Calabria and the eastern portion of Sicily were stored in it.
With the arrival of the Angevines (1266), the castle returned to the possession of the Abbey of S. Eufemia. At the beginning of the 1500s, after a period of direct control by the Aragonese, it became the property of the Caracciolo family (1501 - 1607), and then of the D'Aquino family (1607 - 1799). The castle occupies the summit of an outcropping that dominates the city of Nicastro and the whole Lamezian plain.
In 1992, the Community of Lamezia Terme obtained financing (from the European Community) for the castle's restoration under a general project planned by the architect Domenico Massimo. The Administration named the architects Domenico Massimo and Nicola Purri as directors of the works, Caterina Vitetti head engineer, and the draftsman Pietro Giampa as assistant, the latter two being from the Community Technical Office.

The Castle of Nicastro and the Church of S. Teodoro

At the outset of the project there were a series of meetings with the Superintendency of Archaeology of Calabria as well as with the Superintendency of Monuments, from which emerged a common desire, later an objective, that the restoration of the castle in its various phases from the evaluation to the execution of individual jobs be the carried out through a collaboration of various professionals (director of the works, archaeologists, geologists, geological technicians, specialists in the preservation of ruins, specialists in the restoration of ancient walls), and that all these professionals, coordinated by the directors of the work, should operate under the supervision of the Superintendencies which in turn are the entities dedicated to the guardianship and protection of monuments.
The restoration imposed was to be, of course, the type known as "conservation," by which is meant those specific jobs (fixing and joining the walls, reinforced openings, reestablishing connections, engagement and disengagement of joints, injection of restorative mixtures, protection of the tops of the walls, restorative surfaces, etc.) that tend to maintain the existing portions and interrupt (or retard as much as possible) the monument's natural process of degradation. The reconstruction of portions of the walls was not foreseen, except for small and recognizable connections that will have a consolidating and strengthening effect.

As already pointed out, the first phase of the work, which now is for the most part finished, has involved a series of research projects that have yielded a relatively complete appreciation and diagnostic picture of the monument's state of health. Such research must precede any type of work, and the more complete it is the more adequate will be the following work of restoration, either in terms of the structure's historical-monumental profile or its scientific-technical profile. In our case, the research(described next) was carried out in collaboration with specialists in various areas.