The view is not enough to see the end of the impressive system of waterfalls of the Carolino aqueduct that carries water from Mount Taburno to the palace gates. The Reggia di Caserta has often been identified as the Italian Versailles, but its dimensions are larger than the jewel of Louis XIV. Located about 30 kilometers north of Naples, the royal palace of the Bourbons, declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1997, is the largest royal palace in the world, with 1,200 rooms, 47,000 square meters, 1,742 windows and 34 stairs . There, on April 29, 1945, the formal surrender of the Nazi and Fascist forces to the Allies was signed.
But despite its impressive decorations, this superb building created by the will of Carlos de Borbón (1716-1788) to express the power of the new kingdom of Naples is not as well known in the world as Versailles, the Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna or the Royal Palace of Madrid. The fall of Naples at the hands of the Savoys and the unification of Italy condemned it to oblivion in the 19th century. Later, bad administration, bad publicity and even the proximity of the Camorra, the regional mafia, have not contributed to generating good international propaganda. The degradation was such that during a search of a former Berlusconian deputy, Nicola Cosentino, who was being investigated for alleged relations with a clan, a copy of the keys to Caserta was found, which the politician used to jog as if it were the garden of their own house.
A situation that the current director of the Reggia of Caserta, Tiziana Maffei, wants to change. Maffei presented Fragmentos de Paraíso , an exhibition of 150 works including paintings, drawings, sculptures or tapestries that want to reveal the value of the impressive garden of the Reggia di Caserta, all exhibited in the Queen’s apartments, a new area that was not open to the public so far.
“The Reggia is a story of damnatio memoriae,” explains Maffei, comparing his situation to the Roman practice of condemning an enemy’s memory after his death. “With the unity of Italy, the value of the Bourbon kingdom in Naples was lost to ignorance, and so was the Reggia. They closed their eyes to a reality that was too reminiscent of the Bourbons. In addition, the palace suffers from being in the province, far from a European capital such as Naples, which takes all the visitors. And above all it suffers from being one of the many royal palaces: the extraordinary dimension it has has not been understood”, Maffei defends.
The royal palace of Caserta was ordered to be built by order of Carlos de Bourbon (when he was king of Naples and Sicily) in 1750, a few years before he was called to Madrid to become Carlos III and leave the Italian fiefdom in the hands of his son, Ferdinand IV of Naples and III of Sicily. His intention was to erect the Reggia as the ideal center of the new kingdom of Naples, in a place somewhat remote but close to the bustling city that would be the administrative capital. Caserta was in the middle of a great plain, a territory that the Romans already called Campania Felix (prosperous) for its fertility.
The great Baroque palace was designed by the architect Luigi Vanvitelli, who was the son of the important painter Gaspar Van Wittel, who had restored the dome of Saint Peter with Benedict XIV, and a student of Nicola Salvi, architect of the Trevi Fountain. His intention was to emulate –and rival– the other great palaces of the European monarchies, starting with Versailles, and even surpass them in beauty.
The first stone was laid in January 1752. Construction progressed steadily until Carlos de Borbón left the Kingdom of Naples in 1759 to go to Madrid after his half-brother Fernando VI died without issue. Since then, the works began to slow down and when Vanvitelli died in 1773 the palace had not yet been completed. His son Carlo had to continue the work together with a series of other architects trained in the Vanvitelli school.
The visit to the palace, with five floors, includes a tour of the royal apartments, with the impressive throne room used to receive the personalities of the time or a room dedicated exclusively to the tradition of the Neapolitan nativity scene, with several examples that demonstrate the passion that already aroused his representations of the birth in the eighteenth century.
But, in addition to its exuberant rooms, the Reggia of Caserta deserves a stop above all for its royal gardens designed by Vanvitelli, who displayed his facet as an engineer with the sophisticated hydraulic work that carries water along 38 kilometers through the Carolino aqueduct, which for the most part is buried, with a succession of waterfalls, ponds and fountains. It also highlights the English garden so desired by Maria Carolina of Habsburg, sister of Marie Antoinette of France and much more sophisticated than her husband Fernando, who left the ladies of the court without payments to cover the costs of this outdoor space. . Unlike the Italian garden, the Maria Carolina garden is characterized by an apparent natural disorder of water sources and Roman ruins, such as the cryptoportico in the Bath of Venus that has statues brought from the ruins of Herculaneum, next to Pompeii. , which began to be systematically excavated during those years. It was one of the first landscape gardens on the peninsula.
It is the importance of the gardens in the history of Italy that Maffei wants to vindicate now with his exhibition, since he considers that the park of Caserta is “the great forgotten” of the unfinished royal palace. “Today we are giving voice to Vanvitelli’s dream: we are making the theater recover its function, we are studying finishing the never-built staircase, we are reopening corridors, we are giving great importance to the aqueduct and especially to the park,” says the director. For all this they have a substantial cash of 25 million from the recovery plan and another almost 70 million that they are using to restore rooms, open new exhibition spaces or the maintenance and management of green areas. They have also recovered the old vineyards of Fernando IV, entrusting part of the land to a local company that in recent years has dedicated itself to recreating the fresh and fruity white wine that he apparently liked so much and offered at his banquets.
The intention is to attract more visitors – before the pandemic they received 750,000 a year – but above all that those who come here as part of a stage of a trip to Naples or the Amalfi Coast do not come just to spend the day. The territory of Caserta, they consider, has much more to offer. For example, the San Leucio complex, the silk factory of Fernando and María Carolina, which was a unique reality in Europe as it was a space where the entire process of some rich fabrics that came to decorate Buckingham Palace was carried out.
