We leave our garden house at 9 to drive South, towards Napels and our new home for the week. After one hour, we take a break to see the world second largest Roman amphitheatre, the Amphitheatre of Capua. It was the model for the famous Colloseum, and just as a quary for the nearby castle. Sadly it’s closed on Monday, so Tim flies his drone for some pictures as the children play in the playground.
According to our navigation app it’s only a four minute drive to our next stop, a Roman roadside mausoleum. But the traffic is horrendous, and we slowly crawl through Capua. Half an hour later we take a picture from our car as we don’t want to search for a parking spot in this traffic. Onwards to our next stop, the gigantic royal Palace at Caserta. The largest former royal residence in the world, some 2 million m3.
This should also be a four minute drive, but the traffic is awful and we continue our crawl, as we near the palace we look for parking spaces but everybody is already double parked even in tow zones. We don’t dare to do the same so we search for a parking garage. We think we take the right turn but as we disappear in a tunnel it veers away from the town and we are on an expressway out of town. We risk a uturn as the traffic is slow and get into another tunnel leading to the tourist parking, which seems abandoned and locked so we try to follow another sign which leads us to another entrance of the same abandoned garage.
Fuming we decide to give it one last try and circle ever wider around the palace, until we see a small parking lot, we adopt the Napolitean way of driving by blocking the road as we cross and queue to enter the small parking lot. The gate opens and cars are double parked everywhere. Someone guides us to a place, we park and hand over the key hoping we’ll find all our belongings when we return.
It’s a short walk to the huge palace which looks well maintained, which can’t be said for the desolate looking square in front of it. We get the combi ticket for the gardens, the royal apartments and the gallery. We are advised to start at the English gardens which will close at 13.30. We can see the fountains far in the distance, it is a 3km walk through the enormous park. Luckily there is a shuttle bus for some extra Euros, we decide this is money well spent and sit back and relax for a change.
Sadly all of the fountains and waterfalls are either turned off or being restored so we can only imagine the true beauty of the park. At the far end we’re dropped off at a huge waterfall with two groups of sculptures and make our way to the English landscape garden. We’ve seen better examples on our trips to the UK but the sun breaks through the clouds and we enjoy the fresh air. One thing this garden does better than all others is the folly, probably because the real deal can be seen all around. This folly is a curved neoclassical cryptoportico with fake holes and cracks in the ceiling. You would almost believe it is a Roman ruin.
We get back to the palace with our electric bus, ready to tackle the giant complex. It was built in the 18th century for the Bourbon kings of the Kingdom of the two Sicilies. It’s an extravaganza of Baroque architecture and endless rooms with painted ceilings and golden gilded motifs. The palace was used as a filming location for Star Wars the Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. As with the movies, the intentions were good but it all felt a bit hollow. Which wasn’t helped by the fact that the palace was looted during WW II.
As we walk back to the parking a man approaches Tim saying something about a key. The first instinct is to ignore the man and continue walking but then Tim remembers this is the man from the parking, he tells us to pick up the key in bar Bosco.We wonder what would have happened if we wouldn’t have stumbled into him but pick up the key and find our car with everything inside.
Since we’ll be staying in our new home for 7 nights we decide to do grocery shopping for a week. Olga is gone for a while as Tim reads his book and the children play with the car windows. It’s a bit hard to fit all these groceries into our fully packed car but we manage and text our host as it should be a 30 minutes drive. But just after texting we’re stuck in traffic as we try to get onto the autostrada. Another accident blocks the traffic for a while before we can speed to Torre del Greco, our home for the week. Here we go back to moving at a snail’s pace through the main street. As we finally approach our holiday home Tim spots a man across the street and waves but when he waves back we have already past what is the entrance gate to our complex. Time for another uturn some blocking of traffic and we drive through the gate, hoping not to get in the car for some time..
