Greetings from Caserta! (Well, these would have been greeting from Caserta, because I started writing this while we were still there...but we came home today).
We arrived here on Thursday afternoon via train from Termoli (with a change in Foggia). Here are a few quick pics I snapped through the window of the train as we passed through the countryside of Campania:
Hotel Royal Caserta, where we chose to stay, is about a two minute walk from the train station - very convenient. Not the prettiest part of the city, to be sure - except that it is also a very short walk to what is, in my opinion, the main attraction - the Reggia di Caserta (Royal Palace). We can see it from our room:
We didn't do much sightseeing on Thursday; we had a little rest in our room and then headed out to dinner at Nippon. As much as I love Italian food, I was glad to have a chance to eat something else for a change - there just are not any restaurants serving other cuisines very near where we live, except for a sushi place in Termoli that we have yet to try. Because Italian food is extremely regional, I have a theory that for Italians, eating food of a different region in Italy is equivalent to eating "ethnic" food elsewhere. In any case, the Asian fare was a real treat!
The little spheres reminded me of hush puppies, only with bits of octopus tentacles in them...yum!
My dessert was "tiramisushi" and the "sauce" was coffee. Points for cleverness as well as flavor: 12/10 would eat again.
The next morning, we had 11 AM tickets for the Reggia di Caserta, which included both the building and the grounds behind for the bargain price of €15 each - and it was money well spent. Although I noticed that EU citizens between 18-24 only have to pay €3 while those citizens over 65 can visit for free - alas, I was both too old and too young for a discount.
The palace was used as a filming location for both Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones (side note: according to an advert in the lobby of our hotel, there is a spa located in a sister hotel to ours called Naboo; this was also the "brand" name on all the toiletries in our bathroom). Sadly, I didn't look up exactly which parts of the palace were used in filming prior to taking photos there. I think I saw Phantom Menace when it first came out, but haven't viewed it since, and I honestly can't remember if I've ever watched the other one, so nothing really jumped out at me like "hey, there's such and such place from the films!" If you recognize anything from the movies, do let me know:
Kind of boring for a throne. If I were queen, I would want a fancier seat to cushion the Royal Backside.
Only a relatively small portion of the 1200 rooms are part of the tour. There are a lot of comparisons to Versailles online. We haven't been to Versailles (yet) so can't say how accurate that is; personally, the style and general décor of the various rooms and suites reminded me somewhat of Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin (without the lovely dome). Interestingly, I didn't see very many references to WWII within the tour, although in the Chapel, you can see damage caused by bombing:
After we explored the inside of the Reggia, we walked outside to stroll through the grounds - and "stroll" we did - it turned out to be quite a hike from the rear of the palace all the way up to the last fountain at the end of the park, where there is a waterfall cascading down the side of a mountain from which the water for the fountains flows. Duh moment: we didn't realize that it was a water fall when we were viewing it from the palace end of the park - it was so far away that it just appeared that we were heading toward a big monument or statue of some kind. If only we'd had binoculars! The end of the park/waterfall turned out to be much farther than we expected. At the waterfall end, there is also an English Garden, but we decided to skip visiting it, as we needed our remaining energy just to make it back down to the palace! The health app on my iPhone says we walked almost 10 miles that day; I'm sure most of it was measured during our perambulations up and down the palace grounds. However, despite our aching feet, it was worth it:
Rear façade of the Reggia
The "monument" - or so we first thought
Not a giant monument.
After we recovered from our walk back down the palace grounds to our hotel, we headed out to dinner a few blocks away at Locanda Battisti (a seafood restaurant with a name that translates to "Baptist Inn;" I wish I'd though to ask the staff where the name came from). The food was pretty good, although not at the same level of awesomeness we experienced at Nippon the evening before:
My dinner had faces!
Next up: Saturday in Casertavecchia