Real Belvedere di San Leucio

On the hill above Caserta, a Bourbon king tried to build a working utopia. From 1773 Ferdinand IV turned a hunting lodge into a silk colony with its own schools and statutes, and looms still run today inside the Silk Museum, where UNESCO-protected halls, an encaustic royal bath and workers' houses tell the whole experiment.

Why it matters

San Leucio is the third component of the Caserta World Heritage site, and the official UNESCO page of the property singles out the complex for the idealistic principles behind its conception and management. The museum's account places the colony project in 1773, when Ferdinand IV enclosed the hunting grounds around the Belvedere and introduced silk production. It also describes free education for workers' families. In 1789 the colony adopted its statute, which set an eleven-hour working day and established social and educational provisions. The Comune di Caserta describes the statute as abolishing private property within the colony. The site is managed by the Comune di Caserta and still produces silk.

What to notice

The ensemble brings together the industrial archaeology of the old silk factory, the Historic Apartment, the Royal Gardens and the Casa del Tessitore — a worker's home furnished as at the start of the twentieth century. In the factory, nine restored hand looms illustrate the production of brocades, lampas, damasks and the famous coperta leuciana, a broad damask cloth that appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century, while two great cylindrical twisting machines, reconstructed in the 1990s from original drawings, illustrate the processes of the historic silk industry. Upstairs, the Bagno Grande known as the Bagno di Maria Carolina was painted entirely in encaustic in 1792 by the court painter Philipp Hackert; the dining room carries Fedele Fischetti's frescoes of the life of Bacchus, and Giuseppe Cammarano painted the Aurora on the bedroom ceiling. The Coretto is linked to the church of San Ferdinando Re, where the royals once attended mass.

Context and history

The works and the circular-city plan of Ferdinandopoli were executed by the architect Francesco Collecini, first assistant to Luigi Vanvitelli, before the grand urban dream was shelved after the Restoration. The experiment ran until Italian unification, while the continuing silk tradition preserves the hill's industrial identity, which is what makes San Leucio read as living industrial heritage rather than a memorial. The gardens descend the hillside, and the museum describes the Royal Gardens as a sequence of seven terraces. After unification and through the twentieth century the site kept its textile vocation, and its Codice delle Leggi della Real Colonia di San Leucio remains the document that made the colony famous as a social experiment.