The castle under Alfonso I

Besides modernising the apartment that had belonged to the Duchess Eleonora for his wives, firstly Anna Sforza and then Lucrezia Borgia, the duke built other wings and rooms in the castle to house a grocery store and a goldsmith's workshop and also an armoury (various rooms for housing arms and munitions).
This was one of his great passions; he was an expert in the design and casting of cannons. Alfonso completed the great Ducal Kitchens, built on the foundations of the demolished Porta del Leone and the East Gatehouse below the Giardino degli Aranci and more than anything else he modernised and extended for himself the apartment-study that had belonged to his father on the Via Coperta. And so that small but precious residential quarter came into being. It consisted of a sequence of rooms, known as the Golden Study or Alabaster Study and into it flowed an extremely important collection of the artistic talents of the day.
A real decorative blueprint created with the help of the greatest artists of that time, from Ferrara and elsewhere, such as for example Titian, the Dossi brothers, Antonio Lombardi, Raffaello Sanzio, Giovanni Bellini and others.