Royal Palace of Caserta
Last Updated (Tuesday, 18 November 2008 12:38) Written by cips Monday, 03 November 2008 16:27
Kind of monument: Private building
Location: Caserta (near Naples), Italy
Groundbraking: 1752 a.C.
Year completed: 1780 a.C.
Architectural style: Baroque style
Architect (main or first): Luigi Vanvitelli
Orderer: Charles VII of Bourbon
The Royal Palace of Caserta is the most grandiose Italian Palace, constructed for Charles VII of Bourbon, King of Naples, who dreamed of another Versailles. The original project was made by Luigi Vanvitelli (1750-1751); this architect was the son of the Dutch view artist Gaspard Van Wittel, who moved to Italy in 1675. Vanvitelli’s project provided not only for a Royal Palace and its park, but also the plans for the new City.The brick and stone Palace is built on a great rectangular plan about 249 M. long and 190 M. wide (272 x 207 yds ). It has a regular façade which seems to anticipate neo-classicism choices and which is characterized by a huge, central arch, surmounted by a fronton or pediment. On the exterior, the ground floor is decorated with ashlarwork, made from a high plinth and a colossal arrangement of semi-columns and ionic parastades on the upper floors. Four rectangular courtyards, vast and luminous like squares and perfectly symmetric, are spread out in the interior of the Royal Palace. Three octagonal vestibules perfectly regulate the complex circulatory systems. The Great Staircase of Honour, wide and scenographical, leads to the octagonal vestibule from the noble floor (on which the apartments and the decorated, neoclassic influenced, plastered rooms open out, as well as to the Royal Chapel, which is similar to that of Versailles, but more harmonious. In the interior of the Royal Place, we can also see a small Court Theatre, in an almost neoclassic style: a small treasure of its kind. The apartments are richly decorated with gold, stucco and marble and contain empire style furnishings and fine pavements.The apartment of the bourbon king Ferdinand IV 1780. Include a library of 10,000 volumes and an 18c Neapolitan crip with more than 1200 figures carved upon it. In the building, which has 1,200 rooms and almost 2,000 windows, you can find a picture-gallery and a museum in which a famous collection of precious antique nativity cribs is preserved.The construction of the Royal Palace was carried forward by Luigi Vanvitelli until his death (1773), and then continued by his son Carlo; anyway, it wasn’t entirely completed in accordance with the original project. The Park of the Palace, also designed by Vanvitelli, is the last grandiose example of garden-park of the Baroque era. Scenography of grasslands, false ruins, woods, avenues which lead to the “Castelluccia” (miniature fortress, constructed in 1769 for the amusement of the young King) and to the ample sheet of water of the fish pond. It is one of the biggest parks ever to have been created annexed to a courtly residence, measuring as it does some three kilometres in length and covering an area of some hundred hectares.But the Park is not only big: it is also one of the most beautiful in Europe and can unquestionably sustain the comparison with that of Versailles.