Parco Reale e Giardino Inglese della Reggia

Behind the palace, a vast park is organized around a monumental water axis. Luigi Vanvitelli designed the water axis, supplied by the Caroline Aqueduct. His son Carlo completed the complex with substantial changes to the original design, while John Graefer's English Garden introduced a contrasting landscape of rare plants and deliberately staged ruins.

Why it matters

The Royal Park forms part of the UNESCO-listed ensemble, together with the palace, aqueduct and San Leucio. The Bosco Vecchio, the Via d'Acqua and the English Garden express different aspects of the eighteenth-century landscape design. Vanvitelli, who had studied Versailles, Fontainebleau and the Tuileries, designed a tree-lined avenue of meadows, groves and parterres down which the waters of the Caroline Aqueduct would feed every fountain, as the palace's own restoration page records. UNESCO's brief synthesis singles out the English Garden as one of the greatest, oldest and most important picturesque gardens created in Europe — the counterpoint to the formal axis, tucked into the park's far corner.

What to notice

The Via d'Acqua forms a continuous hydraulic composition linking the Torrione and the fountain of the Dolphins: basins, cascades and sculptural groups depicting Venus and Adonis, Ceres, Aeolus and dolphins, ending at the artificial grotto crowned by the Great Cascade that closes the view. At the culmination of the Via d'Acqua, beneath the Great Cascade, the Diana and Actaeon Fountain's marble groups depict the myth from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The 1756 design envisioned nineteen fountains; financial constraints led the Vanvitellis to reduce the scope of the original project. The English Garden contains deliberately staged ruins and the Serre di Graefer: a productive garden with historic greenhouses and an old botanical school. A barrel-vaulted greenhouse displays paintings inspired by the Plantarum Regii Viridarii Casertani, the Bourbon-era catalogue of royal garden species.

Context and history

The park was conceived together with the palace in the 1750s, but its authorship is a family story: Luigi Vanvitelli set the monumental axis, and after his death in 1773 his son Carlo continued the park's development, compressing the fountain programme for cost. The gardener Johann Andreas Graefer, remembered by the palace as the historic royal gardener, gave the English Garden its botanical ambition; the greenhouse recovery project now restores the original functions of acclimatisation, scientific study, propagation and sale of species, including plants listed in the nineteenth-century catalogues.