The castle of Otranto  was  the setting of a novel of Horace Walpole, famous English writer.

The novel "The castle of Otranto", published for the first time in 1769,  was  a  sensational  "literary case"  and it got an extraordinary success.

Whole England grew fond of  the vicissitudes of the prince Manfred, sad figure of wicked  who  doesn't hesitate to turn upside down the life of the castle, to attain his perfidious purposes. Father of Conrad and Matilda, husband of Ippolita,  he decides, after the sudden death of his child, to marry Isabella, betrothed to his son Conrad, to secure himself a heir and the power. The prayers of the devoted Ippolita and Gerolamo, man of Church and spokesman of St. Nicola, were of no avail. The prince, deranged by his passion,  will go so far as to  kill his daughter Matilda. Manfred’s behaviour  stirs up the ultramundane power and a series of supernatural episodes and miraculous facts are the setting of the stories of the tyrant and his family.

And just  the relation between Manfred and the next world is  the  spring  that regulates the device of the plot that develops in a dense atmosphere of tension, fear and suspense... in the Castle of Otranto, with its feudal outfit of  dungeons, trap doors, oratories, galleries, tapestries and... ghosts!