Caserta Things to Do

The Caserta Palace garden is now a park. Its main feature is an enormous series of fountains leading to an 82 metre high waterfall fed by a specially built aqueduct. It is a very long walk from the palace to the waterfall, so you might want to take the bus back that goes up and down the park.

From the palace to the last fountain the roadway is straight . Fountains, pools, statues and various other sculptures around little stairways lead you up to the next level. When you reach the end of these, the roadway broadens and forms a semi-circular avenue marked by a wall (decorated with these statues). It is a very beautiful sight. Google links the Palace to an episode of star trek or star wars (if I remember correctly).

Luigi Vanvitelli (and his son who continued the work afterwards) is also responsible for the gardens, who climb up the hill for up to 3km. Fountains, ponds and statues decorate the park and the walk, with the artificial river running in the middle and descending in cascades from the hill. From the farther end of the gardens, you can have great views of the palace itself.

If walking uphill is not something you fancy, you can always use the use of the buses that run the whole distance...

The palace itself was built by Luigi Vanvitelli, an architect from Naples and is really impressive, with its 1200 rooms and 1790 windows.

Inside, the sheer height of the ceiling in royal rooms and the decorations that stay on the "light" side (classicism reigned at the time) provide a feeling of grandeur, but without being oppressive or overbearing.

Speaking of the "light" and dark side, it is in this palace that the interior scenes of the royal residence of queen Amidala from Star Wars were shot.

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Warning: this 'extra' part of the Garden's walk is not recommended is you are not able bodied, or in a large family group with kids! There are risks involved in the part of the climb.

Apparently there is a path leading right up to the top of the waterfall at the end. It has been blocked off with wooden planks on both sides, but people (like me) still attempt the climb up. It was easy for me to decide to do the climb because people had already broke some planks off so you could just skip underneath it.

The paths up have not been maintained probably since the closure so it's not entirely safe. The paths are quite steep slope paths (they're not stairs), and in some areas near the waterfalls, the water spill over on the paths making it very slippery due to the algae.

Then as you reach to the top, you'd still need to climb through a fence hole by the waterfall. Take note that this is just beside the top of the waterfall so extra care is needed. Once you're in you just need to get to the second floor of that monument up there. It's quite a workout since you start from the palace right to the end and then still do this steep climb.. The view is amazing. Definitely the highlight of my Reggia di Caserta Trip!!!

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At the end of this walk, you will come to a spectacular fountain with sculpture works by Paolo Persico, Angelo Brunelli and Pietro Solari, depicting the mythilogical episode of Diana and Actaeon, with the spectacular man made water fountain as the backdrop.

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In this stage, you can see cascading pools of water from nearly the back of the gardens. Each pool there are large carp-like fishes. It's refreshing to hear the water gushing from one pool to the next. The gradient of the land starts to slope up.

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In this second stage of the walk you will first see a large flat pool, with live fishes in them, they look like carps..

At the end there is a nice large fountain with many statues. There wasn't any water spouting from the statues at that time, but the poses of the statues really define the scene to be quite like a great painting. Unfortunately the front of the fountain was barricaded so you can't get close to the waters..