Campanica | Monitoring Italy's Campania region around Naples

BUILT TO SERVE THE KING AND THE COURT Almost incommunicably vast – the Royal Palace of Caserta contains some 1,200 rooms – and with acres of parkland. Charles VII ruled as an absolutist monarch, but he was also an enlightened one. Through his mother, Elisabeth Farnese, he had inherited the legendary Farnese collection in Rome, which he set about having brought to Naples. An Italophile, he preferred the palaces of Italy to anything he had grown up with in Spain, and was a sensitive and active patron of art. The palace of Caserta has lost nothing of its power to astonish | Apollo Magazine