Real Bosco di Capodimonte

Charles of Bourbon made this hillside a royal hunting reserve. Planned from 1735, the Real Bosco di Capodimonte has five fan-shaped avenues, woodland, an Anglo-Chinese garden and historic buildings surrounding the museum.

Why it matters

The Real Bosco was planned as a royal hunting ground, a walled forest of holm oaks crossed by long sight-lines. It extends up Capodimonte hill from the museum plateau to former farmsteads, pheasant enclosures and a porcelain factory. More than 400 plant species have been introduced over two centuries.

What to notice

Antonio Canevari and Giovanni Antonio Medrano outlined the Baroque layout in 1735–36. Ferdinando Sanfelice reorganised it between 1742 and 1748 around five fan-shaped avenues, and Ferdinando Fuga completed the scheme between 1760 and 1770. The avenues connect the church, porcelain works and outlying farms. The park contains four historic gardens: the Spianato, the Anglo-Chinese garden shaped around 1840 by botanist Friedrich Dehnhardt, the late-Baroque geometric garden, and a northern pastoral zone once used for pheasant breeding. Six trees have official monumental status, including a camphor at the royal fruit orchard. Seventeen historic structures survive, including Sanfelice's church of San Gennaro (1745) and the Capraia farmstead, now a research centre for port-city art history.

Context and history

Carlo di Borbone turned Capodimonte into a hunting reserve in the years after 1734, and the wood stayed attached to the crown's pleasure across the Bourbon and Savoy reigns. Its factories and farms were working premises: the Real Fabbrica della Porcellana operated here from 1743 to 1759 before moving to Naples, the Cellaio stored wine and grain for game-keeping, and the Fagianeria raised Chinese and American pheasants. The statue of a giant on the grounds had been carried from the Farnese palace in Rome and reassembled in 1763. In the twentieth century the park passed to the state museum. Recent restoration projects have returned several buildings and garden spaces to cultural use, including the church of San Gennaro, the nineteenth-century Stufa dei Fiori greenhouse and Giardino Torre, which contains a historic oven associated with early written mentions of Margherita pizza.