Italy's Largest Royal Palace: Caserto | World's Greatest Palaces - Season 1 Episode 3

Palaces, the most spectacular and lavish homes on earth. Luxuriously designed for the royals who wanted the biggest and the best. Behind the golden gates of these royal megastructures are incredible stories waiting to be discovered. Infamous monarchs from history and the artists, designers and engineers who turned their grand visions into a reality. These are the most opulent, flamboyant and innovative royal residences around the world. In this episode, the Royal Palace of Cuserta is a neo-classical masterpiece. This gigantic structure has 1,200 rooms on five floors and by volume, with more than 2 million cubic meters, is the largest palace in the world. The hub of the Bourbon-ruled Kingdom of Naples, it combines stunning architecture with mind-boggling engineering to create a truly unique building, making Cuserta one of the world's greatest palaces. Lying 30 kilometers from Naples in southern Italy, the Royal Palace of Cuserta was built in 1752 for King Charles VII, but by the early 1860s, the Kingdom of Naples was no more. Despite the short amount of time this spectacular palace existed as a royal residence, it is famous for the engineering feats and revolutionary politics that were the lifeblood of the kingdom. One of Charles VII's first acts as King of Naples was to commission a brand new palace 30 kilometers north of the capital. Charles VII chose Cuserta. It's actually, when you go now there, it seems rather a little bit in the middle of nowhere comparatively, because there were always revolts in Naples. He wanted it away from Naples because otherwise, I think he feared that there'd be constantly people bashing on the windows saying down with you. He wanted it away from there, but he also wanted away from the possibility of sea attacks. The most magnificent city in Europe was Paris maybe, but Naples was on the same plan. Charles was a very young and determined king to make this capital important. And so he wanted to build this regia to expand his propaganda against his relatives, Bourbons and Absoluts. To realize his dream, Charles approached one of Italy's most prestigious architects, Luigi Van Vitelli. Van Vitelli's real name was Van Vittel. His father was a Dutchman who had settled in this southern capital, and he was a genius. And his job, he was told by the king, you've got to make it bigger than Versailles. So it was bigger than Versailles. It was definitely statement architecture. This palace said, I am the king, I am not being deposed, and I am here to stay, and I am rich, and I am powerful, and bow down to me, all country. So Van Vitelli, he had grand, grand ambitions, and the sky was the limit really because Charles VII wanted everything that could possibly be done to create him as the great, great ruler who would never be pushed off his throne. Not only did Luigi Van Vitelli design the Grand Palace, in 1753 he also engineered a water system that is the lifeblood of the entire kingdom, the Caroline Aqueduct. The challenge of bringing water to the palace from the Tiburno mountain region, 38 kilometers away, was massive. The water system's source, in the province of Benevento, is 254 meters above sea level. By the time it reaches the waterfall in the palace gardens, the elevation is 203 meters above sea level. Transporting 700 liters of water per second, Van Vitelli's aqueduct is a mathematical marvel. When you're designing an aqueduct, the art is to get the water to flow along it at an even rate. You have to lay the aqueduct to a very exact gradient. In this case, the gradient is just one millimeter in a meter. And there are many things that are very difficult to do, but measuring one millimeter in a meter with the type of instruments you had in the 18th century was not easy. And to consistently lay the aqueduct over this huge distance at that kind of gradient would have been extremely difficult. If you think about it, the best way to allow water to transport over long distances is just to allow gravity to do its thing. The problem is that if the water is flowing too fast, then it can actually erode the structure because you get fast flowing water and it's kind of cutting away at the stone or the tunnels that you've built or the mud or whatever materials you're using. But on the flip side, if it's not flowing fast enough, then bacteria and other nasty stuff can start growing in it and actually contaminate the water. So there's some kind of happy medium ground that the engineers would have had to figure out over a vast distance. And that to me is some really impressive engineering. The majority of the Caroline Aqueduct is underground, hidden amongst the mountainous It took nearly a decade to complete the epic project, opening on the 7th of May 1762. The part of the aqueduct that is visible, the Ponte della Valle, was at the time the longest bridge in Europe. Van Vitelli did these extraordinary calculations, but to build it is a whole other challenge because when you're building things out of big pieces of stone, when you're tunneling through mountain, when you're creating these channels, things move. Your stone might be half a millimetre bigger than you expected, so there must have been a huge amount of accuracy that went into the actual construction of it in order to achieve that really, really gradual slope. In the history of fountains and cascades, there are many examples where people spent a great deal of money and then it didn't work. What was so successful at Caserta was that it so obviously works, that the cascades are so dramatic, that the water is produced in such quantity, that all of the gymnastics, all of the huge length of the aqueduct is worthwhile because it creates these amazing effects at the end. It creates one of the most dramatic cascades ever constructed. It's absolutely amazing to see it. It really is a true feat of engineering, simply to carry the water. To think it didn't even take 10 years to build, I think it's one of the greatest aqueducts in the world. The story of the Palace of Caserta begins two decades before the Caroline Aqueduct was constructed. During the War of Polish Succession in 1734, the Kingdom of Naples was acquired by the Spanish House of the Bourbon Dynasty. These are really a hugely powerful family, who had fingers in every pie, we might say. They were great, they were powerful, and at every opportunity, they tried to increase their power and make them greater. The Bourbons had, so far, ruled France, and so then they ruled Spain. Philip V of Spain had a very ambitious wife, Elizabeth Thornese. So, by dint of a lot of intrigue, she managed to dictate foreign policy, and the Spanish army conquered southern Italy, which is Naples and Sicily, known as the Two Sicilies. So, there was this enormous family alliance, France, Spain, the Two Sicilies. The new Bourbon Kingdom was gifted to the royal couple's 18-year-old son, the Duke of Parma, who subsequently became King Charles VII of Naples in 1735. But the new king was far from impressed with his new home. And of course, the first thing that you need, if you're in charge, is a nice big, new, shiny palace. One of the most celebrated rooms at Caserta is the library. The 14,000 books that are housed here date back almost 300 years, to a time when the Neapolitan palace was the heart of a royal dynasty. It's not a very big collection, but there are some treasures, and many of these books were published for kings, for princes, and widespread only among the aristocracy of Europe of that period. Among the artefacts are drawings of architect Luigi Van Vitelli's ambitious project, which would eventually become the royal palace of Caserta. The blueprints from 1752 reveal a truly grand vision. These are the original Van Vitelli's designs. Van Vitelli designed the Regia, inside and outside, because he was a scenographer and wanted to make a complete project, a very inclusive project, in and out. So he projected all the spaces, room by room, one by one, and all these sections. Probably he had some assistance, because the work was impossible to be done by only one person. He ordered all the materials, all the stones, the marbles of royal palace, and paid all the workers, also craftsmen. Today we tend to think that we can build things faster. What's interesting about modern construction is it's very rarely as fast as construction in the past. The main determinant of construction speed was the number of people on the job. Caserta used people from all over the local area. In fact, it was a major source of employment. And the more money you put into a job, the faster you could do it. It was built in the 18th century, and at the time, actually, the techniques weren't that broad or wide. So big buildings of that scale tended to be built from stone, from masonry, from brick. So you can see with the palace of Caserta that it's a big, imposing, large, heavy sort of structure, which is typical of what you would get if you build out of masonry. Like many buildings of this period, what you see is not necessarily the material underneath. What may look like stone is very often just brick behind. What may look like marble is very often painted or polished plaster. This is the world of effect, of great spaces created with as little cost as you can, because you can afford more of it. And Caserta is all about war. The rectangular palace measures 247 by 184 meters and encloses four inner courts. Its five floors cover 47,000 square meters each, and by volume, Caserta is the largest palace in the world, with more than two million cubic meters of space. The techniques that we would have seen in the 18th century would actually not have been that different to some of the techniques we were seeing in the Egyptian civilization and the Roman civilization, because the premise was the same, that you're taking units of a material, whether that's brick or stone, and then you're binding them together in some way. So the binding could have been through types of glue, which are mortars, so they're mixes of lime powder, different kinds of resins that basically form the glue that allowed you to stick these big blocks of masonry together. So foundations becomes a challenge because you've got all this weight, you've got all this stone, and making sure that the structures are not sinking down into the ground, the engineers would have had to make sure that the ground had been carefully studied and that the weight could actually be nicely spread out so that it stayed nice and stable, and a lot of manual labor would have been used. So I think if you think about the sheer number of people that would have been slogging away trying to build these palaces, it probably kind of boggles the mind, really, compared to the number of people you would see on a construction site today. Inside the four walls of the imposing structure, Van Vertely's layout shows inspiration came from more than just one influence. The palace is something of a mix of designs. There is Renaissance, there's Neoclassical, there's Baroque. What the Bourbons are trying to say is they are as powerful and as great as the Roman Empire and as the great classical rulers. One of Van Vertely's most stunning creations is the grand staircase. The marble steps rise 32 meters high across two levels and are overlooked by a fake dome. Orchestras could hide inside the structure and perform music for the king without being seen. At the top of the first set of eight meter wide steps are three sculptures that Van Vertely added to intimidate the king's visitors. The merit, the truth, and in the middle, the royal majesty. Then, as you turn to continue the ascent, the staircase splits and continues upwards as two separate five meter wide flights with a gradient of just 15 degrees. From an engineering point of view, the side steps that kind of sweep around the central staircase were made from a single piece of limicella stone from Trapani. And when I try to think about, well, how did they transport that stone? How did they get it to site? How did they then lift it in place and then carve it and make sure that it all fit together properly? That's some pretty impressive design right there. The royal staircase was then and is now one of the greatest parts of Caserta. The marble, it's this huge sweeping panorama and it's so long and so huge. It really is incredible and I think when you stand there, you really can imagine the grandeur, the beauty of this huge court. Another of Van Vitelli's lavish creations at Caserta is the stunning Court Theatre. Vincenzo Mazzarella believes the groundbreaking auditorium is a masterpiece of design. Van Vitelli had conceived and designed the theatre outside of the palace's walls. Subsequently, Carlo III wanted the theatre to be inside the palace's body. Also because the theatre outside, let's say, the palace's walls also had a civil function. The king said, no, I need a court theatre for the court, for my family. So Van Vitelli sees himself in the design and thinks and builds the theatre inside the western arm of the palace. And there was a passageway from the royal palace so that the king could attend the performances. The first problem that any architect faced with a theatre design has to tackle is lines of sight. How do you design a theatre so that everybody in every seat can see the stage? And thus you have to do a drawing where you lay out lines from every point in the stage back to the seats. This produces the great arch, the arcing, semi-circular shape of a theatre. Integrating the theatre into the palace itself proved tricky for the architect. At the engineering level, how do you support these gaps, these important thrusts of the ceilings? With the doubling of the wall. We have those pillars that, from under the foundations, reach up to the Palatine Chapel when they become a narrow corridor, but they serve to support the thrusts of the ceiling, of the vault. Now I'm going to give you a gift, a suggestive and hidden place that nobody ever sees. Follow me. This is the under-stage. Got it? Here it is. And now let's see something structurally and architecturally marvellous. Come. Look, a radial pillar, a radial pillar. We are under the platform. This single pillar supported and supports the entire platform, completely. It is a completely Bambitellian invention. You see, a radial pillar. It took 13 years to build the theatre, which was finally ready to stage productions in 1769. Anyone lucky enough to get a seat here would have been completely blown away. The first floor balcony actually sits at ground level. The stalls are five metres below, deep in the foundations of the palace, which gives the theatre extra structural strength. Van Vertely also had another trick up his sleeve. One unique feature of this theatre, which I think is quite fun really, is that they had an openable backdrop. And this was designed by having a detachable portal. And what they would do is basically open up this backdrop towards the end of the performance, and then you would have the royal parks as your scenery for the play or for the music that you were watching. And that must have been a really, really special thing to witness. The Court Theatre is one of my favourite parts of Caserta. It's really very well preserved. It's so beautiful. It's just very ornate, very elegant. And it is the ultimate extravagance. You've got your own theatre. You don't even have to go out. Everyone comes to you. And the idea of just being able to pop into your palace, into a theatre, is marvellous. Some of the performances were so realistic that the audience weren't even sure if the drama unfolding on stage was part of the production. The Royal Court Theatre proved to be architect Luigi Van Vitelli's last hurrah. Luigi Van Vitelli died in 1773, but his designs continued to be realised in and around the palace. The sprawling 300-acre park that surrounds Caserta is another engineering marvel. Architect Leteria Spuria appreciates the scale of Van Vitelli's design. Luigi Van Vitelli had the original idea for the Royal Park. He had been appointed by King Charles to plan a new magnificent royal palace and a huge park to compete with the other European royal residence and to have an alternative place to the capital that was in Naples. Part of Van Vitelli's elaborate design included an impressive optical illusion. The purpose of the telescope effect that you can see from the central gallery of the palace is to include in one single frame all the elements that are along the central axis of the park. It's an optical effect that is based on perspective, so the distance from the palace to the waterfall seems shorter than it really is. And what is particularly dramatic about the garden is the way it's laid out in a perspectival fashion. That is, it's a very long garden and it's symmetrical straight in front of you, and thus you have no way of judging how long it is. And what's more, it's on a slope, so one's eye assumes that it is flat, but it is of course sloping up with great cascades coming down it. So you have this unnerving feeling of not knowing how far away anything is. The eye is dragged from the back of the palace. You look up the garden and there's this couple of kilometres away this wonderful fountain and the stream coming down towards you. And it really was staggering. I personally think that what's really impressive about that is again the setting out of it. How did you actually make it perfectly flat? How did you get it to be perfectly straight to ensure that that visual effect, that perspective, ended up so incredibly impressive? Despite commissioning both the Caroline Aqueduct and the Palace of Caserta itself, Charles VII never actually spent a night there. In August 1759, after serving as King of Naples for 25 years, he headed back to Spain. Charles VII commissioned the palace, was in love with the palace, dreamt of the palace, but he never actually lived there because he abdicated the throne of Naples in Sicily to go and be Charles III of Spain. And so instead, the throne of Naples in Sicily came to his son, Ferdinand, and he took over the palace. In 1767, at the age of 16, Ferdinand took full control of the kingdom. The following year, he married Maria Carolina of Austria, combining two of Europe's royal powerhouses, the Bourbons and the Habsburgs. Well, they always said that he was only interested in hunting and practical jokes. He was, in fact, much brighter than people realised. But he married a really tough lady, who was Marie Antoinette's sister, Maria Carolina, who ran the show for a long time. Maria Carolina is one of my favourite figures. She is this incredible woman. She was married off to Ferdinand when she was really very young, and she arrived a shy young princess in the palace, in a very different place. I mean, Naples in Sicily is nothing like the formal palace of Austria, but she was an intelligent, determined woman. Adjacent to the palace, the Belvedere of San Lucio had been part of the kingdom during Charles VII's time at Caserta. Ferdinand IV and Maria Carolina reigned through a progressive era known as the Age of Enlightenment, or Illuminism. And, under the new royal couple, San Lucio was turned into a self-sufficient commune, which included its own silk factory. Alessia Parabello runs tours of the complex, which still functions to this day. Ferdinand started the restoration of Belvedere between 1773 and 1774. The hall was transformed into a church, while the cow house was used as a silk factory. In 1789, the royal colony of San Lucio was founded, and little by little it came to form a community of weavers. Ferdinand extended the grounds of Caserta to incorporate San Lucio. The workers at San Lucio provided for the palace, and, in return, the king and queen provided them with a place to live. and really very early example of a form of socialism, really, because this was the factory where all the materials were made for the palace, silk, furniture, all kinds of things that they needed. So, it really was the beginning of the idea that you could give workers homes, you could give workers a place to live, and job security as well, which you start seeing in the 19th century. These throwing machines were activated by an hydraulic wheel that is under this floor, linked with this wooden column that rotated so the silk can twist itself and reinforce. The hydraulic wheel at San Lucio is still powered by the water from the Caroline Aqueduct, some 250 years after it was built. Silk are still made for clients worldwide, like Buckingham Palace, Vatican, White House, and all the most important institutions of the world. I love the project, I love the fact that the workers were so important for the king. I love the fact that there are these beautiful houses and this project full of principles of socialism and French Illuminism. King Ferdinand IV's wife, Maria Carolina, came from a powerful family, the Habsburgs. Her mother, Empress Maria Theresa, ruled Austria for 40 years, and her sister, Marie Antoinette, was the Queen of France. Maria Carolina was a chip off the old block. She was a great matriarch, had huge amounts of children, she was a great politician. She believed that you, as an empress or a queen, you're not just a consort, you are there to help rule. The whole idea that women were simply meant to listen and obey their husband, she had no time for that. Maria Carolina, she knew she was more intelligent, more political, more savvy, more sharp than her husband. One of Maria Carolina's greatest additions to Caserta is the English-style garden, created in 1785 by Carlo Van Vertelle and English gardener John Andrew Graefer. Maria Carolina's inspiration behind it was born out of competition with her sister. The garden was a means of escape for Maria Carolina, whose marriage to Ferdinand was not a happy one. Despite this, she had 18 children with her husband, seven of which survived to adulthood. When she gave birth to her first son, Carlo, in 1775, Maria Carolina became even more powerful. When she had a son, that meant that she was allowed to be on the council, and pretty much she began to rule the court. Ferdinand was a man who was not the greatest of intellects. He loved dancing and he loved hunting, so his life was all about hunting. So quite a lot of his business was done while he was hunting, but she did an awful lot of the business without him. She was a key figure in the court, patronage went through her. She was vital to all the political systems, all the ambassadors. They made very good friends with One example is Emma Hamilton, the mistress of Lord Nelson, who became best friends with Maria Carolina when she was married to Sir William Hamilton, the ambassador, because William Hamilton encouraged that because he knew that the route to power in Naples, the route to influence in Naples, was not through the king, but through the queen. But all power is fleeting. In France, revolution was in the air, and the ire of the angry mobs was focused directly at Maria Carolina's sister, Marie Antoinette. The hardest thing of Maria Carolina's life was to read, was to see, was to hear about what was going on in France with her sister and be powerless to help. There was so little she could do to help. What could she do? Send in an army to rescue her sister, and it was very painful for her. And Emma Hamilton, the mistress of Nelson, the wife of Sir William Hamilton, the ambassador, she gained access to Maria Carolina first up because she delivered a secret letter to her from Marie Antoinette. So Emma went to see Marie Antoinette when she was imprisoned, took a secret letter to Maria Carolina, and after this, Maria Carolina and Emma were best friends. They were never two-parted. After the fallout from the French Revolution, in which Marie Antoinette was beheaded in 1793, Napoleon Bonaparte swept his French army across Europe, starting a series of wars and creating chaos. At the turn of the 19th century, he arrived in Naples. Napoleon invades, but the reason why Napoleon gets such a good welcome in Naples is because people have seen about the French Revolution, and they are starting to rise up. They are rising up against being governed by the Bourbons. They are angry. They are Republican. And so Napoleon, curiously, because he was, you know, one of the most dictatorial people you could imagine, creates this upswell of Republican sentiment who ally with him because they think, oh, well, if we follow Napoleon, if we help Napoleon, we'll get free and we won't be ruled anymore. We'll be able to be independent. So Napoleon is seen by an awful lot of ordinary people in Naples as their liberator from Bourbon tyranny. Protected by the British Royal Navy, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina fled the kingdom. And the Royal Navy evacuated the royal family to Sicily, where they set out the war because the French couldn't cross the Straits of Messina without being blown out of the water. Maria Carolina was forced to flee to Sicily, the first in 1799 during the Partenopean Republic, the Neapolitan Republic, so the revolution, and the second with the advent of the French Kingdom, so between 1805 and 1815. After this second exile, she never returned to Naples. She went to Austria and died there in 1814. Maria Carolina had left a world that she no longer understood. It was so painful for her to see her beloved sister thrust off her throne, put into prison, eventually executed, and then she herself lost her throne. It was a terrifying time. To her, it seemed like utter madness. Europe was on the brink of pure anarchy by throwing off kings, queens, executing them. It was the most difficult time of her life to see her sister suffering and not being able to help her. And then, of course, Napoleon came for her too. But Maria Carolina's legacy lives on at Caserta, in the vast and beautiful grounds. Although only two kings ever ruled at the Royal Palace of Caserta, it stands as one of the most incredible buildings in Europe, and remains an engineering colossus, with its own theatre and factory in the grounds. It's huge, it's architecturally brilliant, the aqueduct is fantastic, the gardens are amazing, but why I love it is because it is a symbol of the great peak before the fall of monarchy, of royalty, of these dictatorial, tyrannical, great imperial families. It's the last moment, it's the last flush of their grandeur, because after this, they had lost everything and they were never going to get back their power.