Finally a castle bigger than Versailles

We take the local train from the central station in Naples to the small town of Caserta’s. You probably would expect a small place like this to have any major sights. But nothing could be further from the truth. Just after walking out of the station and crossing the road – we get to a huge castle. It’s actually bigger than the much more famous castle in Versailles.

The courtyards of the palace

Another courtyard

The walk up to the castle goes through a large open area without most vegetation – the long pathway to the castle ensures you are sufficiently impressed by the huge building. When you finally arrive at the castle it consists of three different courtyards which each have a castle building which would have been a huge castle in its own right if they had been standalone castles.

We go into the castle and get the ticket for the castle and the garden out behind the castle. The inside is humongous.  There are no less than 1,200 rooms inside the castle – so we are not going to see each and every room in the castle. I guess some of the castle isn’t really open to the public and used for different offices. But the big rooms and many of the two dozen state apartments inside the castle is open to the public.

We start the tour around the castle walking up a very impressive stair to some huge hallway – from there you start to walk around the impressive halls and the state apartments. It takes ages walking the long hallways on the different floors while taking many pictures of the individual rooms. There are actually a lot of people visiting the castle – but with so many huge rooms the castle isn’t crowded at all – and if you are patient you can almost get some of the rooms to yourself.

It takes a couple of hours walking through the many big rooms – and looking at a few of the different exhibitions inside the castle.

After we had finished walking around the long halls of the castle we get outside and walk into the garden. If we had thought the castle involved long walks inside the castle it was nothing compared to the outside garden. There are actually two gardens and they are huge.

Inside the garden there are several pools and fountains and some of the pools are several hundred meters long – and to reach the end of the garden you have to walk along several of the pools to get to the end. The pools and fountains are impressive and there are some of them which double as fish pools.

Looking back at the castle

Huge pool

Fish fountain

The last fountain

It takes hours to get to the end of the pools and down at the end of the pools there are another English style garden – unfortunately it had taken so long walking to the end of the main garden – so the English garden had closed. Since the English garden was closed it is time to turn around and walk the hour walk from one end of the garden to the castle and head out of the complex and head back to Naples.