Royal Palace of Caserta

Where it sits. The palace stands at the northern edge of Caserta, about 30 kilometres north of Naples on the plain between Monte Tifata and the Volturno valley. Charles of Bourbon chose the site deliberately: inland and defensible, out of range of naval bombardment that could reach Naples, yet close enough to govern from. The building is aligned on an axis that runs from the entrance vestibule straight through the block and out along three kilometres of park to the cascade on the hillside behind — a single sightline that Luigi Vanvitelli extended, on paper, all the way to the sea. Caserta's modern town has grown up around the forecourt, and the railway station sits directly opposite the main gate, which makes the palace one of the easiest major monuments in Italy to reach.

The story behind it. The foundation stone was laid on 20 January 1752 for Charles VII of Naples, later Charles III of Spain, who wanted a seat to rival Versailles and Madrid. Vanvitelli, son of the Dutch-Italian painter Gaspar van Wittel, designed a rectangular block of five storeys enclosing four courtyards: roughly 250 metres by 190, some 1,200 rooms, 1,742 windows and 34 staircases. He died in 1773 and his son Carlo finished the work in the 1780s. By volume it is generally counted the largest royal residence ever built. In 1997 UNESCO inscribed it together with the Carolino Aqueduct and the silk-working village of San Leucio, treating the three as a single Bourbon engineering project rather than as a palace with outbuildings.

The interiors. The Grand Staircase of Honour is the set piece: 116 steps of Trani marble rising in a single flight that splits into two returns, watched over by a pair of marble lions and lit from an octagonal vestibule above. Beyond it lie the royal apartments, an enfilade of state rooms running the length of the facade — the Halberdiers' Room, the Bodyguards' Room, the Throne Room with its gilt ceiling, and the smaller Bourbon private rooms with painted overdoors and inlaid floors. The Palatine Chapel, modelled on Versailles, was bombed in 1943 and remains partly unrestored. A nativity display, a court theatre inserted into the west wing, and the original wooden model of the palace complete the circuit.

On screen. Film-makers use Caserta as ready-made monumental architecture, and George Lucas used it twice for the same fictional address.

• Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) shot the interiors of the Theed Royal Palace on Naboo here, working the staircase, the vestibules and the state-room enfilade as the corridors of Queen Amidala's seat. The Naboo throne room itself was a studio build in England; what Caserta supplied was scale that no set could match.
• Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002) returned for further Theed material, pairing the Caserta interiors with the Plaza de España in Seville, which played the palace exterior. A viewer moving through one Naboo sequence is therefore crossing between Campania and Andalusia without noticing.
• Mission: Impossible III (2006) staged its Vatican infiltration in the courtyards and corridors, and Angels & Demons (2009) used the palace for Vatican interiors that could not be filmed in Rome.

The park and the waterworks. The garden is a two-and-a-half kilometre stepped canal punctuated by fountains, each with sculpture groups in white marble against grey stone: Aeolus, Ceres, Venus and Adonis, and at the head the Great Cascade, where water drops from the hillside into a basin holding Diana and Actaeon mid-transformation. Every litre arrives by the Carolino Aqueduct, Vanvitelli's 38-kilometre channel from the springs of Monte Taburno, which crosses the Maddaloni valley on the Ponti della Valle — three tiers of arches, 529 metres long and close to 56 metres high, and arguably the finest thing the project produced. To the east, the English Garden was laid out from 1786 for Maria Carolina by the gardener John Andrew Graefer, with advice from the British envoy in Naples, Sir William Hamilton; it holds a false ruin, a cryptoporticus and one of the earliest camellia plantings in Europe.

Getting there and timing. Trains from Naples Centrale take roughly 35 to 45 minutes and stop across the road; from Rome the journey is a little over an hour by high-speed service to Naples plus the local connection. The park is long, flat and almost shadeless, so a shuttle bus and bicycle hire operate along the axis — walking the full return is around six kilometres. The palace closes on Tuesdays. Spring fills the English Garden with camellias and the cascade runs strongest after winter rain; autumn gives the clearest views back down the axis to the facade.