Today's Cathedral of San Michele Arcangelo

IT

Caserta

One name for three cities

From the magnificent hamlet of the oldest city, the original Casa Hirta, secure in the hills for seven centuries, before becoming Caserta Vecchia, supplanted in its main functions and abandoned by the vast majority of the inhabitants in favour of the new Caserta, corresponding to the current capital, developed in the plain below.

CASERTA
CASA HIRTA

The new Caserta on the plain around the Lombard tower

The large and fertile plain crossed by the Volturno had been chosen several times, already in antiquity. By the Oscans and Etruscans, founders of the city of Calatia as early as the 8th century, and then by the Samnites to whom the 5th-century tombs found a few decades ago under the Royal Palace belong...

01.

HAMLETS

Sites of ancient settlements continue to welcome strongly rooted communities that perpetuate their identity, preserving picturesque settlements marked by time, customs and traditions, historical and cultural memory.

02.

CASTLES

Traces of dismantled walls or still mighty stone monuments, guarding roads, feuds, businesses and civilizations, castles stand on the heights with their severe charm, millenary witnesses of the passing of time.

03.

MUSEUMS

In the territory inhabited since the dawn of history, every era has left traces and finds saved and handed down for the benefit of contemporaries by the numerous museums of cities and towns, small and large caskets of civilization. Unmissable.

04.

SANCTUARIES

On the mountains, in places that are not easy to access but certainly have a suggestive landscape, over time the collective faith has created sanctuaries and places of prayer, with historical testimonies and often surprising works of art

05.

ROYAL DELIGHTS

Beyond the Royal Palace, the other residences of the Bourbon sovereigns in the favorite places for their royal leisures, centers of excellence for agricultural production, selected farms, factories and avant-garde manufactures for their time, experiments of new social life.

06.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES

Theaters and amphitheaters, roads and sacred and civil buildings, well preserved and present in the cities of ancient settlements, tell the importance of Campania felix at the time of ancient Rome, when Capua was second only to the Urbe

07.

TRAILS

Itineraries with an ancestral charm, following paths beaten since ancient times and advancing into places of still uncontaminated nature, where the meeting of nature and culture creates unique landscapes of rare beauty.

08.

REGGIA

The largest palace in the world, a masterpiece with a thousand surprises by Luigi Vanvitelli, it extends across the great plain with all the sumptuousness of its buildings, the immense park with its attractions and the kilometre-long waterway.

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Caserta

The new city Cathedral had as a very troubled genesis, which it has dragged for decades due to the vicissitudes linked to the design and construction of the edifice, but also to some historical events of the Kingdom of Naples.

The work on the new temple started in 1783, when, having lost the the parish church of San Sebastiano due to a fire, the inhabitants of Caserta had to perform all the religious functions in the small Fifteenth century church of the Annunziata. To get a new church they referred directly to the king, who solicited the local authorities to launch the work. The project was entrusted to the court architect Giovanni Patturelli, but it did not convince the clients, who asked for the intervention of the sovereign precisely on the eve of the Carbonari uprisings of 1820/21. It was only then that King Ferdinand decided that the little church of the Annunziata had to be demolished to make space for a cathedral and he entrusted the new project to Pietro Bianchi. On the 30th of May 1822, the first stone was laid and ten years later the new church with three naves was inaugurated, and was a resounding failure. A new architect was then called, but his work was rejected as well. Only in 1837 the architect Pietro Valente was in charge of the renovation of the Cathedral. He directed the Academy of Fine Arts, of which he revolutionised the pre existing structure, giving it a decidedly neoclassical imprint and calling the best artists of the moment to embellish it. They finally reached the inauguration of the Cathedral, dedicated to Saint Michael the Archangel, in February 1842 and King Ferdinand II and Queen Maria Teresa also participated in the solemn ceremony. Over time, other minor interventions and other embellishments would follow, until the last intervention in 2014, which restored the basements, where crypts were created preserving the archaeologic finds found in the Caserta area and which house works by contemporary artists.

On the façade of the Cathedral there is the staircase in Bellona stone, which gives access to the three entrance portals to which correspond the three naves inside, separated by columns. The central nave is covered by a coffered ceiling decorated with stucco. Between the nave and the transept there is the Triumph of Saint Michael the Archangel over the evil by Luigi Taglialatela. The apse has frescoes depicting the Twelve Apostles and biblical episodes. Among the chapels, one is dedicated to Sant’Anna, patron saint of the city.

IL TERRITORIO

IL CAPOLUOGO

LE CITTA' PRINCIPALI