Did you know that Italy has a royal palace that rivals Versailles in size and splendour? Located about 40 minutes north of Naples, the Reggia di Caserta was built in the 18th century by King Charles III (known as Charles of Bourbon), who looked to the famous French palace for inspiration.
Designed by Luigi Vanvitelli, the Reggia di Caserta has 1,200 rooms, a 123-hectare royal park, and English gardens with more than 200 species of plants and 24 sculptures. So why does nobody seem to know about it?
Caserta has the best pizza and a royal palace that rivals Versailles
The palace welcomed 770,000 people in 2022, which may seem like a lot, but not when you consider that around 10 to 15 million people visit Versailles annually. As a Rome-based travel writer, I was curious to see this under-the-radar palace. And when my husband asked me to try to get a reservation at Pizzeria I Masanielli di Francesco Martucci in Caserta, which was crowned the best pizzeria in the world by Top 50 Pizza in 2022, I figured we could combine the two. I booked our table two months in advance and planned our trip around the reservation. We would visit the palace, eat award-winning pizza for dinner, and spend the night in a cute little bed-and-breakfast called A Corte before returning to Rome the next day.
It takes a couple of hours to drive to Caserta from Rome, so we left in the morning and arrived by lunchtime. Not wanting to ruin our appetite before dinner, we decided to forgo a sit-down lunch and just grabbed sandwiches at the café inside the Reggia before our visit.
Walking through the royal apartments, it wasn’t hard to see why the palace is likened to Versailles. The throne room is more than 130 feet long, with ornate gilded mouldings. The throne itself is made of carved and gilded wood with light blue velvet upholstery.
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We filed through a series of rooms, each one different from the one before it. Some had painted ceilings, while others had chandeliers made of crystal or Murano glass. We saw the recently reopened 19th-century wing with ornate four-poster beds and lavish antiques in the bedrooms of rulers Joachim Murat (Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother-in-law) and Francis II of the Two Sicilies. I was especially intrigued by the original red granite bathtub and Carrara marble dressing table, as well as the library with a telescope and antique globe. Pieces of 20th-century modern art were displayed in many of the rooms, which seemed a bit out of place but didn’t detract from the palace’s splendour.
Additional restorations are underway in the room dedicated to Mars and on the grounds of the palace, which stretch for nearly two miles (3.21 km). Strolling through the Royal Park toward the English Garden, we admired the neoclassical statues of Apollo and the nine muses and elaborate fountains poised along a via d’acqua. Some of the fountains depict sea monsters, while others depict ancient gods and goddesses like Ceres, Venus, and Diana. We walked along the gently sloping via d’acqua, finally reaching a waterfall, which distributes the water carried to the fountains on the palace grounds. We gazed back at the palace, admiring the view, before returning. Perhaps the most incredible thing about our visit was that we felt like we had the palace and the gardens all to ourselves.
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The pizzaioli of Caserta seems to have perfected the art of making pizza
That evening, after a stroll through the Medieval part of the city perched high above the palace, we were blown away by the flavours and textures of the pizza at I Masanielli. Francesco Martucci is known for using haute cuisine techniques — flash freezing, sous vide cooking, dehydrating, and fermenting — to make sublime pizza. And he’s not the only lauded pizzaiolo in the area. Though Napoli is famously the birthplace of pizza, the pizzaioli of Caserta seems to have perfected it. As soon as we got back to Rome the next day, I booked a table at Pepe in Grani, whose owner Franco Pepe paved the way for gourmet pizzerias like I Masanielli, and who appeared on the Netflix show Chef’s Table: Pizza.
I have now eaten at both pizzerias and have gone back to visit the Reggia di Caserta twice since that first trip. So, I can attest that, for travellers who want to get off the beaten path in Italy, a detour to Caserta is worth the detour. Just be sure to plan ahead — those pizzerias book up a month or two in advance.
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(Hero and feature image credit: Laz@Photo/Getty Images)
This story first appeared on travelandleisure.com
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