Ambitious attempt: CASERTA continue… June 15, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Air Tickets, Aquarium, Art Gallery, Coliseum, Destination, Dolphinarium, Flight Schedule, France, Gymnasium, Hotels, Italy, Library, Museum, Oceanarium, Planetarium, Restaurant, Round The World, USA , trackbackImmediately opposite the Great Staircase to the west stands the chapel, which, at the king’s request, repeats the scheme of its counterpart at Versailles. Although Caserta evokes Versailles in concept and ambition, this is the only part of the palace that directly imitates its French predecessor. As at Versailles, the main theme is stated on the gallery level, where coupled Corinthian columns march in stately procession towards the apse. But despite this common feature, the characteristically French ambulatory has been omitted and the proportions of the whole have been to some extent lowered.
The central peristyle also leads to the royal apartments that occupy the south front and the short wing leading to it. Work on the interior decoration was not begun until after Vanvitelli’s death, and even as late as 1845 only nine of the state rooms had been properly finished. Some of the rooms reflect a neo-classical taste that was inspired by the excavations carried out at Herculaneum and Pompeii under the aegis of Charles III. Others, finished towards the middle of the 19th century, groan under the Weight of an indiscriminate mixing of styles. Joachim Murat, a general whom Napoleon set upon the throne of Naples, imported a great deal of furniture from France, Charles’s, son Ferdinand, who was restored to the throne of Naples in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, simply erased Murat’s monogram from the furniture coverings and replaced it with his own. The sequence of royal apartments begins with the Antechamber of the Halbardiers, a bright room lit by windows recessed into the coved ceiling, which is crowned by a painting depicting the Arms of the Bourbon House upheld by the Virtues.
Then comes the Antechamber of the Bodyguards, with walls richly decorated with stuccos and with twelve bas-reliefs showing scenes from ancient history. The next room, the Hall of Alexander, stands in the centre of the south front of the palace; it contains a vast Baroque ceiling painting. To the right are the so-called new apartments, culminating in the Throne Room, a hall 115 feet long that Ferdinand II had fitted out in 1845 to impress the delegates to the Seventh International Congress of Sciences held in Naples in that year. The smaller rooms of the eastern arm of the south front make up the old apartments first occupied in 1780. Outstanding among these rooms are the queen’s cabinets de toilette and her bath, which are attractively decorated in a late Rococo manner incorporating Pompeian elements.
The north front of the palace overlooking the park resembles its southern counterpart, but the prolongation of the giant order along the entire length gives a more festive impression.
The park itself is smaller than originally planned by Vanvitelli, who intended to cover the parterre with a complicated pattern of broderies, ornamental flower beds in the French style. There were to be no less than nineteen fountains decorated with sculptural groups representing themes from passages in Pausanias and Ovid. But when Luigi Vanvitelli died in 1773, very little planting had actually been carried out and lack of money forced his son Carlo to settle for a more modest scheme. Taking advantage of a 25-mile aqueduct built by his father to bring water from Mount Taburno, Carlo created an axial sequence of watercourses stretching two miles up the hill from the palace. Beginning at the far end, the first of these is the lofty Great Cascade embellished by the sculptural group of Diana and Actaeon. (Fountain sculpture of this kind is clearly inspired by Versailles and it is significant that Carlo was assisted by a French gardener, Martin Biancour, in laying out the park.) Then, descending the hill, come the fountains of Venus and Adonis, of Ceres, and of Aeolus, followed by the Dolphin Cascade, the Hercules Bridge and the Margherita Fountain.
East of this long thin isthmus of greenery and water stands a rambling English garden, a quiet retreat where exotic plants surround artificial ruins, statues, pools and wooded bowers. In contrast, the broad, flat section of the park adjoining the palace is laid out in precise geometrical segments. Luigi Vanvitelli created the large pool (la Peschiera) shortly before his death to satisfy Ferdinand I’s passion for fishing. Near by is the Castelluccia, a two-storeyed octagonal pavilion surmounted by a round turret. This graceful little building, which seems to be inspired by the Hellenistic Tower of the Winds in Athens, shows the influence on the aged Vanvitelli of the emerging style of neo-classicism. In fact neo-classical features have been discovered in the main block itself—for example, the severity of the facades with their high podia in smooth rustication and the logical character of the overall plan with its symmetrical wings and openings.
Architecturally, then, Caserta stands at the frontier of two styles: it recapitulates certain great themes of Baroque palace planning, while at the same time heralding the arrival of the European neoclassical style.
The Bourbons lost Caserta a little more than a century after it was begun, for the Risorgimento put an end to the petty states whose bickerings had for so long reduced Italy to the status of a ‘geographical expression’. On September 20, 1860, Garibaldi wrote from Caserta to King Victor Emmanuel that a plebiscite had united the province to the kingdom of Italy. During the Second World War, the palace suffered some damage (since repaired) and after the Italian surrender, it became the headquarters of the Allied Forces in the Mediterranean. Today many of its 1200 rooms are occupied by a branch of the Italian Air Force Academy, though the state apartments and the park are open to the public.
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