Palace of Caserta

In 1751 Charles of Bourbon bought the fief of Caserta from the Caetani family of Sermoneta, a purchase that included a villa which George Berkeley had described on 15 May 1717 as standing about half a mile from the settlement, degraded and abandoned. The king meant to make the place the new administrative centre of his kingdom, and the ground was chosen because it was generally reckoned safe: away from the eruptions of Vesuvius, protected from attack by sea, and at a distance from a congested and revolt-prone Naples. The new palace was to be entirely self-sufficient, with a productive settlement built beside it, on the enlightenment town-planning principles already at work in cities such as Vienna and Paris. Troop barracks were housed inside the building to give the king suitable protection.

Charles had settled on Luigi Vanvitelli as his architect in 1750, before the land was bought, and had to obtain the permission of Pope Benedict XIV to take him, because Vanvitelli was then engaged on the restoration of the basilica of the Holy House at Loreto. The drawings for the palace and its garden reached Naples on 22 November 1751. Work began on 20 January 1752, the king's thirty-sixth birthday, with the ceremony of the first stone in the presence of the papal nuncio; Vanvitelli laid a second, inscribed stone of his own.

The model for the scheme was political as much as architectural. Versailles, very different in its variety and disposition, had solved the same problem of assembling and providing for king, court and government in one large building with the social structure of a small city. Mario Gioffredo had first proposed something of the kind in 1750, and in George L. Hersey's account the proposal envisaged a palace "that was a virtual city, housing not just the court and king but all the main political and cultural elites of the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily - university, museum, library, cabinet bureaus, military high commands, and so on." The population of Caserta Vecchia was moved 10 kilometres to put a workforce nearer the site, and a silk factory at San Leucio was disguised as a pavilion in the parkland.

Workmen and slaves were used on the site, and in 1760 more than two thousand men were counted there. Almost everything that went into the building was quarried or made in the surrounding country: tuff from San Nicola la Strada, lime from San Leucio, grey marble from Mondragone, pozzolana from Bacoli and travertine from Bellona, the exceptions being the white marble of Carrara and iron from Follonica. The rectangular plan measures 247 by 190 metres, with four inner courts formed where two arms cross, five floors, some 1,200 rooms, 1,742 windows, 34 staircases and 1,026 fireplaces; it is one of the largest palaces raised in Europe during the eighteenth century and one of the largest former royal residences anywhere.

Work went quickly while Charles remained in Naples. He abdicated in 1759 to become King of Spain and never slept a night in the palace, leaving his third son and successor Ferdinand IV a building site that then slowed. In 1764 it stopped altogether for an epidemic of cholera and a famine, and the same two calamities halted it again the following year. Luigi Vanvitelli died in 1773 with the work unfinished and his son Carlo took it on. The court theatre, inaugurated in 1769 and modelled on the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, was the only room in the palace that the elder Vanvitelli finished completely, decoration included. The Palatine Chapel, which he designed on the model of the chapel at Versailles while criticising that model and departing from it by setting the chapel inside the palace with direct access from the upper vestibule, was consecrated on 25 December 1784.

The palace began to be lived in from 1789, still incomplete. Giuseppe Maria Galanti, writing that year, reckoned the works had already cost seven million ducats and that more than two thousand people were employed on them. With the proclamation of the Neapolitan Republic in 1799 the palace was expropriated along with the rest of the crown's property; it took no grave damage, but its furniture was plundered and was recovered after the Restoration. Building carried on through the French decade, when Joachim Murat lived in the palace and had an apartment fitted out in the neoclassical taste and hung with San Leucio silks, his throne a chair made by Georges Jacob for Napoleon Bonaparte and his Empire stools brought to Caserta from the Tuileries in Paris. Carlo Vanvitelli died in 1821 and further architects followed him. The palace was completed in 1845, the throne room finished that year for the Congress of Italian Scientists after works begun in 1811 under Pietro Bianchi and continued by Gaetano Genovese; by then financial difficulty had stripped out the corner towers, the central dome and the guard lodgings that were to have enclosed the forecourt. The pair of frontal wings the elder Vanvitelli had conceived on the lines of Bernini's colonnades at St Peter's Square was never built, and the long avenue that was to run from the forecourt directly to Naples was left partly realised by some accounts and never built at all by others.

The park was designed by Luigi Vanvitelli and completed by his son Carlo with several botanists working alongside them, its construction beginning in 1753 and taking Versailles and the royal palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso as models. It covers 120 hectares of partly hilly ground and runs for close to three kilometres from the back of the palace along an alley of fountains and cascades, fed originally by the Aqueduct Carolino, which was built together with the palace. In the upper part lies a botanical garden known as the English Garden, laid out in the 1780s by Carlo Vanvitelli with John Graefer, the German-born botanist, nurseryman and plantsman-designer trained in London and recommended to Sir William Hamilton by Sir Joseph Banks; it is an early Continental example of an English garden in the naturalistic taste of Capability Brown.

In the old wood to the left of the Italian garden, two structures were put up for Ferdinand IV's military exercises and were soon turned over to the amusement of the court instead. The Castelluccia was built in 1769 by Francesco Collecini to Vanvitelli's design, reworking the sixteenth-century Pernesta or Acquaviva tower into a miniature fortified castle with a moat and drawbridges so that the king could simulate the battles he was expected one day to fight; it was restored again in 1819 and given over to rest and refreshment during hunting parties. The Great Peschiera, also designed by Vanvitelli and built by Collecini, was finished in the same year, 270 metres long and a little over 105 wide, and was made so that Ferdinand could practise naval battles with purpose-built models.

Maria Carolina of Austria had the palatine library built along the eastern side of the palace in about three years, and Murat and Ferdinand II later added to it. Its roughly fourteen thousand volumes were arranged by subject by Francesco Ceva Grimaldi and range from European, Neapolitan and Viennese culture to archaeology, mathematics, geography, botany, zoology and the librettos of the Neapolitan theatres; a monogram in the crown on a binding, C or J, shows whether a book was acquired for Maria Carolina or for Murat. The historical archive, wanted by Ferdinand IV, was inaugurated on 25 May 1784 and holds the administrative records of the Caserta, San Leucio and Carditello estates between 1750 and 1860, together with the studies and designs for the palace, the commissions given to artists, workmen and suppliers, and the costs and manpower of each. It runs to some ten thousand volumes spanning the fifteenth to the twentieth century, with a further five covering 1860 to 1950, when the Bourbon sites had passed to the House of Savoy.

Pope Pius IX visited the palace in 1850 as the guest of Ferdinand II, and the court oratory was dedicated to him for the occasion; the sedan chair he used is kept in the small adjoining room. On 22 May 1859 Ferdinand II died in the palace, in what had been Ferdinand IV's bedchamber, of an illness never identified and believed to be contagious, for which reason the room's entire furniture was burned and it was furnished again in the Empire style. On 21 October 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi wrote from the palace to Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy to hand over to him the province of Terra di Lavoro. With the birth of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 Savoyard officials surveyed the contents of the building; the bidet was inventoried as "strange object in the shape of a guitar". In 1919 the whole complex passed out of royal ownership into the state demesne, and from 1923 to 1943 it housed the Accademia Aeronautica, the Italian Air Force Academy.

The most serious documented wartime damage the palace has suffered came in September 1943, when an aerial bombardment struck it and the Palatine Chapel sustained the gravest losses. The chapel had held eight large eighteenth-century canvases commissioned by Charles of Bourbon and Maria Amalia of Saxony from artists including Sebastiano Conca, Giuseppe Bonito and Anton Raphael Mengs. Almost all of them were destroyed, together with parts of the ceiling and columns, the organs, sculptures and valuable sacred furnishings; the altar painting of the Immaculate Conception, attributed to Bonito, is recorded by the museum as the only canvas of the chapel's original pictorial cycle to survive.

From October 1943, during the Allied invasion, the palace served as Allied Force Headquarters for the Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, Sir Maitland Wilson and later Sir Harold Alexander. A set of barracks was built in the left-hand arc behind the façade, referred to in the papers of Lt. Gen. John C. H. Lee as the "Cascade Camp", and soldiers of the US Fifth Army recovered here in a rest centre. At the end of April 1945 the unconditional surrender of German and Italian RSI forces in Italy was signed in the palace, dated 29 April in some accounts and 27 April in others; the agreement covered between 600,000 and 900,000 soldiers along the Italian Front, including troops in sections of Austria. The first Allied war crimes trial took place in the palace in 1945, when the German general Anton Dostler was sentenced to death and executed nearby, at Aversa.

After the Irpinia earthquake of 1980, Lucio Amelio invited contemporary artists to make a work on the subject of the disaster, and sixty-five responded, among them Andy Warhol with Fate Presto, Giulio Paolini with L'altra figura, Keith Haring with an untitled piece, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mario Schifano, Tony Cragg and Joseph Beuys. The resulting TerraeMotus collection was shown first in Boston in 1983, then at Villa Campolieto in Ercolano and the Grand Palais in Paris. It was given to Caserta for good in 1993 and has been displayed in rotation from the following year, in twenty rooms behind the Sala di Alessandro.

In 1997 the palace, its park, the Aqueduct Carolino and the San Leucio complex were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The rationale held that the palace, "whilst cast in the same mould as other 18th-century royal establishments, is exceptional for the broad sweep of its design, incorporating not only an imposing palace and park but also much of the surrounding natural landscape and an ambitious new town laid out according to the urban planning precepts of its time." On 4 November 1998, shortly after the inscription, a fire broke out in part of the attic; UNESCO recorded that the damage was restricted to less monumental spaces and the roof, and that restoration works had begun. In December 2017 a large section of plaster fell in the Sala delle Dame di Compagnia, injuring nobody, and the museum director stated that there was no structural damage; contemporary reports linked the collapse to repair methods used after the Irpinia earthquake of 1930 and to later consolidation work, and described the affected area as close to the part of the royal apartment worst damaged in the earthquake of 1980.

The palace is owned by the Italian state and is one of Italy's state museums, granted special autonomy by the Ministry of Culture, and it recorded 1,028,292 visitors in 2023. The Allied occupation, the German surrender and the palace's return to Italian hands were gathered by the museum and local institutions into the exhibition La Reggia liberata. L'occupazione militare alleata, la resa tedesca, la restituzione all'Italia. 1943–1947. In 2025 the museum announced a programme to create publicly accessible storage for historical and artistic objects that had not formed part of the visitor offer, after a survey of the palace and park identified objects dispersed through the complex, often without an organic location or secure archival references; the programme covers the recovery, cataloguing, digitisation and conservation of paintings, frames, furnishings, stone material, paper documents, applied arts, textiles, sacred vestments, presepe elements and other objects.