When Charles of Bourbon, king of Naples, decided to build a royal palace to rival Versailles, he did not do things by halves. The Reggia di Caserta, begun in 1752 to a design by Luigi Vanvitelli, is one of the largest royal palaces in the world, with some twelve hundred rooms, four inner courtyards, a theatre and a grand staircase that has appeared in films including Star Wars, where it stood in for the palace of Naboo. Behind it, a park stretches for three kilometres up the hillside, with fountains, statues and a long chain of pools and cascades fed by an aqueduct that Vanvitelli built specially, ending at a great waterfall at the top.
The whole complex, including the aqueduct and the silk-weaving colony of San Leucio, a utopian industrial village founded by Charles's son Ferdinand, is a UNESCO site. The park is so large that many visitors rent bicycles or take a shuttle bus to reach the top; walking all the way up and back takes a couple of hours. The English Garden, at the top on the right, is a romantic landscape with exotic trees, fake ruins and a bath of Venus.
Caserta is a city of about seventy-five thousand people north of Naples, and riding around it means dealing with heavy traffic, impatient drivers and potholes. The good news is that the hills to the northeast, toward Caserta Vecchia, a beautifully preserved medieval village with a Romanesque cathedral, offer winding roads with views over the plain. Further afield, the Matese mountains and the Benevento hills offer quieter, more scenic riding. Summers are very hot, so visit the palace and park in the morning, and ride in the cooler hours.
Caserta has fuel, shops and restaurants, and plenty of cafés around the palace. The region is the home of buffalo mozzarella, and the farms around Caserta and Capua produce some of the best, eaten fresh on the day it is made. Try it in a caprese salad, on a pizza or simply on its own with a drizzle of olive oil. Capua, a short ride away, has a Roman amphitheatre second in size only to the Colosseum.