Palazzo Reale di Napoli

The Royal Palace of Naples faces Piazza del Plebiscito like a stage set for three centuries of court life. Seat of power for southern Italy from the viceroys to the Bourbons and the Savoys, it preserves the State Apartment with its marble staircase, frescoed halls and Throne Room, alongside the Court Theatre and the gardens facing the gulf.

Why it matters

Few buildings concentrate the political history of the Mezzogiorno as this palace does. It was the residence of Spanish and Austrian viceroys, then the main seat of the Bourbon kings of the Two Sicilies, and its rooms still carry the marks of every regime: Spanish dynastic frescoes, Bourbon ceremony, Savoy heraldry after 1861. Since the State Apartment opened to the public in 1919, the palace has worked as a museum of court life, and it still hosts the National Library and, within its footprint, the Teatro di San Carlo, which keeps it at the centre of the city's cultural map.

What to notice

Climb the Scalone d'onore, the grand marble staircase whose original design is credited to the seventeenth-century architect Francesco Antonio Picchiatti on the model of the Alcazar of Toledo, and read the post-1861 story in stone: after Italian unification, the Savoy cross replaced the Bourbon arms. In the State Apartment, the Galleria keeps seventeenth-century frescoes by Belisario Corenzio celebrating the Spanish monarchy, while the Sala del Gran Capitano carries ceiling scenes from the deeds of Consalvo di Cordova by Battistello Caracciolo. The Throne Room is the ceremonial heart: its neoclassical vault of 1818 personifies the twelve provinces of the Two Sicilies, Giuseppe Bonito's paintings of the Turkish and Tripoli embassies of 1741-42 hang on the walls, and the throne itself, made in 1874, bears the Savoy eagle. In the Sala dei Fiamminghi, listen for the rare 1730 musical machine by Charles Clay, and in the Studio del Re look for the Parisian furniture made for the Quirinale that Joachim Murat acquired.

Context and history

The palace served for over three centuries as the centre of power in Naples and southern Italy, and its present shape is the sum of several campaigns. Fire damaged part of the complex in 1837, and the restoration under architect Gaetano Genovese rebuilt and unified the wings in neoclassical style; the mid-nineteenth-century rooms around the staircase, with marbles from quarries of the old kingdom and allegories of Glory and Victory, belong to that project. The Second World War left its own scars, which the palace's museum of the factory recalls with an immersive installation, and its suspended display of nineteenth-century architectural models includes Antonio Niccolini's 1811 model of the palace with the Teatro di San Carlo and Genovese's own models of the 1840s. A small museum on the ground floor is dedicated to the tenor Enrico Caruso, described by the palace as the first national museum devoted to him, and the Romantic Garden at the foot of the facade opens free to visitors.