The magic of the Royal Palace of Caserta (Reggia di Caserta)

Italy holds the record for the most UNESCO heritage sites in the world, and we are here today to present one of the most famous, the Royal Palace of Caserta.

The Royal Palace of Caserta (Reggia di Caserta) is a former royal residence in Caserta, Southern Italy, builded by the House of Bourbon-Swo Sicilies as their main residence as kings of Naples It is the largest palace erected in Europe during the 18th century.

The construction of the palace began in 1752 for Charles VII of Naples (Charles III of Spain), who worked closely with his architect,Luigi Vanvitelli.

The political and social model for Vanvitelli's palace was Versailles.

 Like its French predecessor, the palace was intended to display the power and grandeur of an absolute Bourbon monarchy.

The Reggia has 5 floors, 1,200 rooms, 1742 windows, 34 staircases, 1026 fireplaces, a large library, and a theatre, modelled after the Teatro San Carlo of Naples.

The Reggia is by far the largest royal palace resulting from a single original project in the world in terms of volume with more than 1 million cubic metres (40 million cubic feet).

Of all the royal residences inspired by the Palace of Versailles, the Reggia of Caserta is the one that bears the greatest resemblance to the original model: the unbroken balustraded skyline and the slight break provided by pavilions within the long, somewhat monotonous façade. As at Versailles, a large aqueduct was required to bring water for the prodigious water displays.

The garden, a typical example of the baroque extension of formal vistas, stretches for 120 ha, partly on hilly terrain. It is also inspired by the park of Versailles. The park starts from the back façade of the palace, flanking a long alley with artificial fountains and cascades. 

The fountains and cascades, each filling a vasca (basin), with architecture and hydraulics by Luigi Vanvitelli at intervals along a wide straight canal that runs to the horizon, 

A large number of figures from classical Antiquity were modelled by Gaetano Salomone for the gardens of the Reggia, and executed by large workshops.

In 1997, the palace was designated a Unesco World Heritage Site; its nomination described it as "the swan song” of the spectacular art of the Baroque, from which it adopted all the features needed to create the illusions of multidirectional space.

With this article, we have started a cultural journey that, over time, will lead us to explore the rich and magnificent historical-artistic heritage of this wonderful country, Italy.

Behind the scene of a decadent giant

This is the sad little story, like so many scattered throughout the Italian territory, of a slow and inexorable decline of a noble palace and of the people who lived there, taken as an example to bring to the attention of the reader, a much wider phenomenon and which, as mentioned, involves our historical heritage throughout the Italian territory.

This palace was built in the seventeenth century by the noble local family, in whose hands it will remain until the early years of the new millennium.

Over the centuries, there have been numerous renovations, due to external events such as earthquakes, Unfortunately, arriving at the present days, in conjunction with the decline of the family, in recent decades, the building has suffered serious and irreparable damages, mainly due to neglect, which inevitably marked its fate.

The house is fully shored up, to avoid structural collapses, and today it is totally unusable. Completely emptied of any element of value, left to collapse in general indifference, today his sheltering pigeons and cats who have found the comfort of a house among its noble rubble.

As anticipated in the first line, this is a fairly common photo story in Italy, where, growing abandonment and wild overbuilding, they leave our territory with hundreds of thousands of forgotten buildings. The numbers are frightening, and trace the profile of a nation that is slowly crumbling, about 6% of all Italian real estate assets are on the way to becoming ruined, a percentage that continues to grow year after year.

Only for statistical purposes, here are some data: About 50,000 buildings are now in a state of neglect, including noble palaces, villas and castles . Approximately 20,000 between ecclesiastical buildings, churches, abbeys and convents in disuse.

The rediscovery of these places, excluding the romanticism of memories, hides a serious social problem: the erosion of the territory. Suffice it to say that it is estimated that over 10,000 square km of territory already occupied by abandoned buildings, in addition to a constant and increasing overbuilding, only in 2018, about 2 square meters per second were cemented, the equivalent of 15 football fields a day.

Today We let concrete devour the territory, the overdevelopment of suburban urban areas, the countless building abuses in protected and at-risk areas, new and useless commercial areas, forgetting the numerous abandoned places that could be redeveloped.

But to us all this seems to leave us indifferent, continuing to build and abandon, following the consumerist logic that has long governed our lifestyles and that will soon lead us to the dissolution of our natural and historical beauties.