Caserta Shmaserta

 

Kids say "yay", Ree is ambivalent and I say "Boo".

It rained a lot last night with more to come in the am, so instead of going out to beat the trails that foiled us a couple of days ago, we plonk on our rain jackets and head off to take the ferry to Naples then a train to Casserta. Yes, Caserta.

The original plan was to head back from Capri to Sorrento and then drive across Italy to Bari (port to go to Dubrovnik). The cost of a hire car in Italy is very high compared with elsewhere. There was no opportunity to hire anything other than a small car (too small for luggage) or a large van (too big for the roads) and both at high cost. So we changed the plan and head off to Caserta which I had never heard of.

Caserta has an old town called Caserta Vecchia "Old Caserta". There is also a palace said to be a close replica of Versailles - we shall be the judges! It also has a good and quick train connection to Bari.

 

Caserta (not) a happening place

 

 

 

Majestic fountain in the piazza in front of our hotel

 

 

 

Disconcerting serviettes holder at bar / coffee. Place

 

 

 

You know a place rocks when you take a picture of spaghetti because it is long!

 

 

 

 

The Reggia de Caserta

But we weren't here for the nightlife, oh no, came to see the palace. The palace is what Caserta is known for. It has been used in Mission Impossible and Star Wars and has 24 hectares of Gardens. It is said to be quite magnificent.

Built in the late 1700s for the king of Naples (damn autocorrect made Naples into Apples). The palace was built with Versailles in mind and has more than 1200 rooms.

No idea why they chose Caserta as the location but hey those kings of Apple didn't have to give a reason?

 

Looking toward the train station

 

 

 

Looking down the path in the opposite direction to the train station

 

 

The gardens in the front are, as you can see, kempt (at best). Would love to tell you about the gardens in the back and of the stupendous magnificence of the palace interior, its sumptuous theatre and stunning decor BUT it turns out that the palace and the gardens are closed on Tuesday which coincided rather perfectly with our visiting Caserta on a Tuesday!

So here is a picture from the web of the palace from the gardens.

 

 

 

So we strolled a bit, ate bad food and had a bit of a rest day. The main drag in Caserta is quite bizarre in that the city seems (to be generous), "not flourishing", however the shops are all high end label shops such as Armani, Versace etc.

The shop assistants stare from the window longingly, but there is pretty much nobody going into the stores. It's like walking through a weird kind of zoo for depressed young humans "working" in unfrequented stores and all the while, subconsciously aware that the self actualization of Maslow's Triangle is a pipe-dream.

There is a short story of Borges that Grant published years ago in a faculty handbook - was about a leopard in a cage not even knowing to dream of what he could have been. Terribly hopeless. Thats what Caserta felt like to me.

The Borges story was about one of the leopards of Dantes inferno (I remember that because I always wanted to know more about Dante and why the inferno was so famous, but have never got round to it). With a bit of digging I found the story on the net and have pasted it below. It's more of a couple of paragraphs than a short story but as I re-read it, I recall how I found (and still find) the piece poetically disquieting. "Valorous ignorance" hmmm

 

 

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Inferno, I, 32 :: J. L. Borges

July 28, 2008 by Sineokov

From the twilight of day till the twilight of evening, a leopard, in the last years of the thirteenth century, would see some wooden planks, some vertical iron bars, men and women who changed, a wall and perhaps a stone gutter filled with dry leaves. He did not know, could not know, that he longed for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing things to pieces and the wind carrying the scent of a deer, but something suffocated and rebelled within him and God spoke to him in a dream: “You live and will die in this prison so that a man I know of may see you a certain number of times and not forget you and place your figure and symbol in a poem which has its precise place in the scheme of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem.” God, in the dream, illumined the animal’s brutishness and the animal understood these reasons and accepted his destiny, but, when he awoke, there was in him only an obscure resignation, a valorous ignorance, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a beast.

Years later, Dante was dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as lonely as any other man. In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life. Tradition relates that, upon waking, he felt that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something that he would not be able to recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of men.

 

 

Off to Bari

With the rain about to hit, we strolled the couple of kms from our hotel to the train station.

 

Bye bye palace

 

 

 

Need a sleep before your trip?

 

 

 

On the platform, worldy goods close at hand

 

 

 

The picture below is at one of the train stops on the way to Bari. Lots of people get off to have a cigarette. This is just the people from one carriage. The train stops for long enough for everyone to have their cigarette which they do....RIGHT OUTSIDE THE DOOR. Nobody can get a bit off fresh air without going through the equivalent of the aftermath of the Dresden fire bombings. Culture shmulture, that's just rude!

 

Me taking a photo over my shoulder

 

 

 

For next time.......the day continues with the....The debacle of the Dubrovnik ferry.