Royal Palace of Caserta Transfer and Tour

The history of the Palace began on August 28, 1750, when Charles of Bourbon, King of the Two Sicilies for 16 years, bought from the heirs of the Caetani family Acquaviva the flat area at the foot of the Mountains Tifatini, where they were a small village and a pyramidal tower, a "torrazzo", precisely. The cost of that transaction took well to the royal coffers 489,343 ducats (as can be seen from the documents of the time), but the expense was deemed necessary for the realization of a project that by the time the monarch embraced: the "military and administrative reorganization of the kingdom "(as written by the architect Gian Marco Jacobitti, Superintendent of Environmental and Architectural Heritage of Caserta in one of his works).

A 'initiative that did not want to build a palace to compete for splendor with that of Versailles, but that it would give the kingdom a new capital, far from the sea and the offenses that could come from this, as had been demonstrated by the English fleet in 1742, when she was threatened to bomb Naples. A new city, in short, of which the Royal Palace constitute the hub and administrative support. An ambitious project, for which it was necessary to hire an architect to the task. It was the Pope - Benedict XIV - Charles of Bourbon, to rise to the throne of Spain under the name of Charles III, received the consent and authorization to hire an architect from Naples, of Dutch origin, who was working on the preparation of the Jubilee 1750: Luigi Vanvitelli. The contacts began in the same 1750 when already fifty years old Bourbon Vanvitelli presented to his plans.

In 1751 the project was officially presented to the king, which he graduated with the consent and approval. Less than two and a half years after the transaction with the Caetani Acquaviva, namely January 20, 1752, was the foundation stone of the work. Frano present the king and his wife Amalia of Saxony, the minister Tanucci, the Apostolic Nuncio and numerous dignitaries. Seven years later, with the work in full swing, Charles left Naples for his move to Madrid as King of Spain.

In 1773 the architect Luigi Vanvitelli died and the construction was not yet complete; only in 1847, at a distance, then, nearly a century after the laying of the foundation stone, was completed the Throne Room: the work could be regarded as accomplished, albeit with some vanvitelliano rehash compared to the original design, not so much due to the death of the great architect, he was succeeded by his son, Charles called in honor of the sovereign, as to the "decreased interest" (as written by the Superintendent Jacobitti) resulted from the departure of Charles of Bourbon Spanish and commitments that distracted him from the memory and nostalgia of "his" Naples and of "his" Caserta.

The Royal Palace, on the basis of meticulous Court accounts, cost an enormous sum for the time: 6,133,507 ducats twelve and a half times the cost of all the territory ceded by the heirs of the Acquaviva, and engaged an unknown number - but certainly enormous - number of hands, including Muslim slaves and prisoners "captured by the royal ships on the Mediterranean or along the Libyan coast" (Gian Marco Jacobitti).

Was the careful choice of materials: the tuff from San Nicola La Strada, travertine from Bellona (the famous "Bellona stone"), the lime from San Leucio, pozzolana from Bacoli, brick by Capua, the iron from Follonica the gray marble from Mondragone and white marble from Carrara. The plan of the building is rectangular, with sides of 247 and 190 meters, a perimeter of 874 meters, a height of 41 meters, an area of ​​over 44,000 feet, and a volume of nearly 2,000,000 cubic meters. The indoor area is divided into four for as many yards and two buildings that intersect at right angles.

Each of the four large and beautiful courtyards has rounded corners from a cut at 45 degrees, and this measure, along with the brilliant insights of Vanvitelli, helps to avoid the rough squaring that would have been inevitable for the mass of the building, "making the 'architecture more fluid and less massive than they might appear at first sight "(Gian Marco Jacobitti).
Vanvitelli designed an access to the Royal Palace in Naples equally monumental and majestic, with a large boulevard (today Viale Carlo III) that is inserted on a double semicircle that forms the great Piazza Vanvitelli, and from which you can see, from a distance, the façade of construction, which is of a delicate pink that you are glia-azure of the sky and the green of the hills.

In addition to the courtyards and other spaces created by the intersection of the buildings, the Royal Palace comprises 1,200 rooms with 1,742 windows (245 of which open in the front). Multipurpose facility in the project vanvitelliano, the Palace was to include, in addition to housing real slots of the troops, administrative offices, the chapel, the theater only 134 of the 1,200 rooms, in fact, were destined for the royal family.

The Royal Palace of Caserta belonged to the Bourbon family for over a century, from 1752 to 1860, when it passed to the Savoy. A ministerial decree attributed it to the land of the Italian State in 1919. The story of the Royal Palace of Caserta overlaps perfectly with the historical route of more than two centuries of his life. Pride, the pride and pomp of the Bourbons at the beginning, for a very short time controlled by the Neapolitan Republic in 1799 and the same year reappropriated to the Bourbons until 1805, when the fate of Napoleon brought the course leader to dominate the whole of Europe and to assign first Bonaparte's brother, Joseph, and then, in 1808, Joachim Murat to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, he returned to the House of Bourbon with the fall of the eagles and the subsequent Napoleonic Congress of Vienna in 1815.

He followed the Savoy period 1860-1919. Since 1926 and in the years before and saw the unfolding of the Second World War, and until 1943, it hosted the Italian Air Force Academy. On 14 December 1943, after the Allied landings at Salerno, was occupied by the Allied Armies. On 27 April 1945 welcomed the plenipotentiaries who signed the surrender of weapons Germanic in Italy.

The baroque reminiscences, models of Borromini, Bernini and Guarini that emerge in the project of the Royal Palace of Caserta not take precedence over Vanvitellian insights and not disturb the unity of the whole: the uniqueness of the work reveals the strong personality of vanvitellian 'architect and forms the basis of the neoclassical style that became popular in the years to come. There is, if anything, to complain of the fact that death has seized before he could fully bring to an end - and in its own way - both the Royal Palace and, above all, the project dell'avveniristica city of Caserta, which would have been ahead of a century urban achievements of the second half of the nineteenth century and influenced those of our day.

In Opera Museum, allocated to the Royal Palace, can be seen the original drawings of Vanvitelli and have an overview and complete the work as he had imagined, while a visit to the Royal Palace and the Park is paradigmatic for identifying, by living spaces, how great were the intuitions of genius vanvitelliano.