As Carlo Menicatti rightly observes, Panciatichi never visited the East nor even Spain or Portugal, which are home to Europe’s Moorish substrate. His travels centred largely around France, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. What inspired him, then, to create his Castello di Sammezzano? Essentially, his private archive — one of the most prestigious in Italy, which sowed the bibliographic seed for the contemporary Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze. Like a kind of Quixote absorbed in oriental texts, it was there that Panciatichi dreamed up his ideal castle. He spent most of his time reading, rereading, and reinterpreting the works of the great English theorists writing on neo-orientalism: Designs for the Pavilion at Brighton (1808) by Humphry Repton, The Arabian Antiquities of Spain (1815) by James Cavanah Murphy, and, especially, Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Details of the Alhambra (1842) by Owen Jones, which took pride of place in his caliphal library.