ROYAL PALACE OF CASERTA, Introduction To The Queen's Apartments

As you visit the rooms that were once inhabited by Queen Maria Carolina of Austria, wife of King Ferdinand IV, let me tell you something about the sovereign.

First of all, you should know that when, at the tender age of 16, she was forced to marry the king of Naples, she was not at all enthusiastic and never had a good relationship with her consort. While the sovereign was cultured, intelligent, refined and loved power, which she actively wielded from 1776, Ferdinand spoke mostly dialect, loved hunting, fishing and having fun. He was not very interested in reigning and was rather uncouth. It is even said of him that he loved to eat with his hands!

Visiting the Queen's apartments, you will be able to appreciate the refined beauty she loved to surround herself with, mainly expressed in the rocaille style, with rooms embellished with mirrors, gilded stuccoes, splendid 18th-century furniture and frescoes, mainly related to Greek mythology, all created by the best artists and craftsmen of the time.

The most interesting rooms are the Work Room, the Bathroom and the adjoining Boudoir, a kind of changing room.

The Work Room has walls covered in yellow silk, frescoes depicting pairs of Greek gods and a splendid gilded bronze chandelier, decorated with an intertwining of cherry tomatoes, a symbol of earth’s fertility in Campania. In this room you can see a marvelous clock in the shape of a birdcage, which originally contained a precious bird in semi-precious stones, given to Maria Carolina by her sister Marie Antoinette. You will find another, identical one in the changing room adjoining the bathroom, where among other things you will notice a curious decoration with blindfolded putti, as if not to violate the sovereign's privacy.

It is the bathrooms that constitute the most curious rooms, with a splendid marble bathtub, lined internally with a thin layer of gilded copper, and washbasins fed with hot and cold water, a true rarity at the time! But even rarer was the bidet, which you can still admire, concealed by the door of a small compartment.

In short, we can say that the queen did not lack any comfort.

Here’s an interesting fact: as many as 17 children were born of the stormy marriage between Maria Carolina and Ferdinand IV, but probably...... not all of them were legitimate. The queen, in fact, had several lovers, the last one even when she was already in her old age: he was the young captain of the king's guards, barely 30 years old.