Reggia di Caserta, Naples
I had seen Versailles several times before I ever heard of Caserta, and each time I left with the settled sense that I had seen the argument at its most complete: absolute monarchy rendered in gilt and parquet, a palace built to make a king feel like the centre of the world. Then I stood at the top of the cascade at Caserta, looking down the length of the park toward a horizon I could not quite make out, and the sense of completeness moved somewhere else.
Charles VII of Naples - later Charles III of Spain - laid the foundation stone on his own thirty-sixth birthday, in January 1752, and gave the commission to Luigi Vanvitelli with instructions to build something that would answer Versailles directly. He never slept a night in the palace he ordered. Seven years into construction he abdicated the Neapolitan throne to inherit the Spanish one, leaving the project to his son Ferdinand and, after Vanvitelli's own death in 1773, to Vanvitelli's son Carlo. What stands today is the work of a family finishing another family's ambition - and, unusually for a royal residence of this scale, the work of a single continuous architectural vision, rather than the two centuries of additions and rebuildings that gave Versailles its more famous, more crowded silhouette.
The numbers, once I looked them up, explained something the eye had already understood standing there. Twelve hundred rooms across five floors. Forty state rooms frescoed floor to ceiling - Versailles, for all its fame, counts twenty-two. And the water: Vanvitelli built an aqueduct across forty kilometres of countryside specifically so the cascades and fountains could run on gravity alone, no pumps, no machinery labouring somewhere out of sight. Versailles's engineers spent a fortune and a great deal of royal patience trying to solve the same problem and never entirely did. At Caserta, the water still just falls, the way it always has, down the length of the park to where I was standing.
None of which quite accounts for what actually happened to me on the terrace above the Fountain of Diana and Actaeon, with almost no one else in sight. Caserta draws a fraction of Versailles's crowds, for reasons I still find genuinely puzzling. It was the quiet, more than the scale, that undid me. Versailles asks to be admired in a queue. Caserta asked nothing. It simply extended, in every direction, further than I was prepared for, and let me stand there working out, on my own, why a palace built in imitation had somehow out-argued the thing it was imitating.