Acquedotto Carolino (Acquedotto Vanvitelli)

Every fountain in the Royal Park of Caserta is the visible end of an engineering feat that begins tens of kilometres away. The Caroline Aqueduct, begun in 1753 under Luigi Vanvitelli for Charles of Bourbon, runs about 38 kilometres of hills, towers and viaducts, and its water still lands in the park's Great Cascade today.

Why it matters

The aqueduct is one of the three components of the UNESCO World Heritage site inscribed in 1997, and the official UNESCO page for the property credits it with binding the whole 18th-century ensemble together, across a route of 38.5 kilometres marked by 67 tower piers, the torrini. The palace's own project page records that the structure was built under Luigi Vanvitelli for Carlo di Borbone across the provinces of Benevento and Caserta, beginning in 1753 and continuing to 1770, to supply the palace, the gardens and the new city, to supplement the 17th-century Carmignano aqueduct that served Naples, and to power workshops, mills, fountains and fishponds along the way. Its endpoint in the royal park is the artificial grotto with the scenographic Great Cascade. Few 18th-century hydraulic works remain in original service; this one does.

What to notice

In Caserta itself the aqueduct survives as masonry in the urban fabric around Corso Vanvitelli and the Bocche district, where the canal line and its tower piers remain visible in the urban fabric. The celebrated showpiece, however, stands in the countryside near Valle di Maddaloni: the Ponti della Valle, a viaduct of three superimposed tiers of arches about half a kilometre long, described by the FAI as begun in 1753 and completed in 1770 under Vanvitelli's direction to carry the Fizzo water to the Reggia, the silk mills of San Leucio and the royal site of Carditello. The towers marked the canal's successive sections; its gradient was measured in fractions of a millimetre per metre. At the springs, the capture works at the Fizzo have their own basins and waterworks landscape, now part of a national restoration programme.

Context and history

Charles of Bourbon's capital project needed water the site did not have, and Vanvitelli answered with a gravity canal that took roughly two decades to build. After the architect's death his successors carried the works to completion, and the conduit went on serving the palace, the town and industry — FAI records a mill on the line later converted to an ironworks, then a mill again, and from 1903 a small hydroelectric plant that powered Caserta's lighting. The complex passed to the Reggia di Caserta in 2010, when the state returned it to exclusive cultural use, and it now falls under the property's 2024 Management Plan, with restoration of the deteriorated torrini and of the principal bridges at Durazzano and Carlo III funded through national programmes.