Reggia di Caserta (Palazzo Reale)

A Bourbon king's answer to Versailles rises at the edge of Caserta: Luigi Vanvitelli's 18th-century palace of five floors and some 1,200 rooms, crowned by a UNESCO listing and flanked by one of Europe's grandest landscape ensembles. Inside wait the Royal Apartments, a private court theatre and a chapel scarred by the Second World War.

Why it matters

The Royal Palace of Caserta is the largest piece of the UNESCO World Heritage site inscribed in 1997 under criteria that praise it as a singular Enlightenment creation harmoniously bound to its landscape. The official UNESCO listing describes it as planned in the second half of the 18th century by Luigi Vanvitelli at the wish of Charles of Bourbon, who intended the complex to rival Versailles and Madrid, with an administrative quarter inspired by the Escorial. The figures on the site's own UNESCO page are stark: a palace of about 138,000 square metres, 1,200 rooms over five floors, four courtyards, and a 123-hectare park behind it. Today the building is run by the Museum of the Royal Palace of Caserta, a state institute with special autonomy created within the Ministry of Culture's 2014 reform of museums.

What to notice

Start from the Grand Staircase, where three stucco allegories — Merit, Royal Majesty and Truth — still watch arrivals, an Enlightenment programme about what makes a good sovereign. On the west side lies the Court Theatre, designed by Vanvitelli after 1756 for the court's exclusive use: work finished in 1768 and the theatre was inaugurated in January 1769 by the young Ferdinando and Maria Carolina. The Palatine Chapel holds the memory of a different kind: Charles of Bourbon and Maria Amalia had commissioned canvases from Sebastiano Conca, Giuseppe Bonito and Anton Raphael Mengs, and almost all were destroyed in the September 1943 air raid that also damaged the ceiling, the organs and sculptures. Some columns still carry the marks. The visit route also takes in the Sale Vanvitelli, the Gran Galleria and the Palatine Library, and the palace's contemporary collection, Terrae Motus, has been the subject of recent official restoration campaigns.

Context and history

Vanvitelli presented his first scheme to the sovereigns in 1751, and in 1756 the "Dichiarazione dei disegni del Real palazzo di Caserta" circulated the designs across Europe's courts. When the architect died in 1773, his son Carlo carried the enterprise forward, including the Royal Park. In September 1943 the palace became Allied Forces headquarters, and the unconditional surrender of Nazi-fascist troops in Italy was negotiated and signed here on 29 April 1945, made official on 2 May. The palace anchors the wider UNESCO system that also takes in the Caroline Aqueduct and the San Leucio complex, with the Reggia acting as the managing reference body.