Tom`s travels: Caserta (04/07/2016)

This time I decided to head to the city of Caserta and visit the immense Palace of Caserta, a Unesco world heritage site. So I took an early train from Salerno and reached Caserta at around 8:50. I then crossed the street from the station and found myself in front of the Palace (In terms of volume, it is the largest royal residence in the world with a volume of 2 million cubic meters.). I payed the ticket (6euros reduced price) and decided to visit the building first and the park after. The whole palace has 5 floors and 1200 rooms, including two dozen state apartments, a large library, a chapel and a theatre. Construction started in 1752 for the then king of Naples and Spain Charles III in the Baroque style by famous architect Luigi Vanvitelli, but wasn't fully completed until 1845. I walked up the amazing monumental staircase and reached the main floor where the monumental rooms started (Caserta has more than 40 monumental rooms completely decorated with frescoes when, in comparison, Versailles counts only 22 monumental rooms). All rooms were lavishly decorated with ceiling paintings, statues and baroque decorations and some were really impressive such as the Throne room, while other were peculiar such as the one with the two Prince's cribs and another with the first bidet in Italy. Next to the rooms was the Palatine Chapel which had unfortunately been bombed during WWII but faithfully restored and splendid looking. After visiting the palace I decided to head out and walk through the park; it is so big that they rent bikes and horse carriage ride just outside the door. I decided to walk instead and head up the main road that cut through like an immense boulevard. Along the way were many impressive fountains such as the Fountain of the Dolphins, the Fountain of Aeolus, the Fountain of Ceres and the Fountain of Diana and Actaeon which ended the park uphill with a beautiful waterfall. Next up was the English garden part of the park, with a completely different display to that of the orderly baroque rest of the park. Here were fake archaeological ruins, botanical plants coming from all around the world and many pavilions overrun by weeds. After thoroughly walking around I decided to head on, and after trying to exit the park from the top I found out I had to walk all the way back to the entrance to exit (another 4km). I was able to find a secondary exit right before the Palace where a local guard let me go out even though I wasn't supposed to. From there I walked further north and reached the small village of San Leucio, were another royal residence is located, also part of the Caserta one. This one was used as a hunting grounds, and then later transformed into a silk factory, thus a village was created around it to bring in workers from the nearby towns. Still today many silks are ordered by Buckingham Palace, the White House, Quirinale and Chigi palaces. The museum was unfortunately closed as it was lunchtime and would remain so till late afternoon, so I decided to eat and head on. In the village I found a small grocery store that sold meats and cheese that made a really tasty sandwich for me. Walking for a while, I passed under Caserta's park and then eventually after a long uphill hike reached the town of Casertavecchia, which used to be the old town of Caserta before being moved close to the Palace in construction. Once I reached the town center, by walking through its really pretty medieval alleyways, I decided to see the Cathedral which I found closed. However a couple from nearby Venice was also waiting to get in so we decided to wait for the custodian to open it. The locals told us he would come soon but first he had to take his daily drink at the bar; 20 minutes later he arrived and finally opened the Cathedral for us. The Cathedral built during the 12th century in the Romanesque style has a beautiful bell-tower under which runs a small alleyway and an interesting interior. Most of the columns are roman in origin, and several decorations are early christian and byzantine in style, such as the pulpit(very similar to that in Salerno's, Ravello and Amalfi's Cathedrals). The couple that entered with me though was quite strange and both were looking around for something, at first I though they might be thinking of stealing, especially when the woman went to the main altar and picked up the cloth covering it, however as soon as they saw me looking they explained they were looking for the spiritual center of the church as they were esoteric students and did so everywhere they went. That creeped me out a little bit so I just waved them goodbye and left. It was time to go so I got back on my feet and walked downhill until I reached, nearly out of energies but satisfied, Caserta's train station and eventually home in Salerno.