We are still here, happy to respond to a positive request from our friend Ileana from Cosy for You (www.cosyforyou.org). Ileana offers us (Cosy for You - Tour for everyone on Facebook) a guided tour of the Royal Palace of Portici (*), one of the most underrated beauties of Naples and its surroundings. We have been there recently and we confirm that it is worth a visit; to begin to talk about it the best thing seems to give us the introductory text taken from the official website www.centromusa.it, where you can find all the information on the museums and the botanical garden: The Royal Palace of Portici is one of the most splendid examples in Europe of the summer residence of the Bourbon royal family and its court. Located on the slopes of Vesuvius, it has an upper wood, originally dedicated to hunting, and one downstream, of a more ornamental type, extended to the sea. The Royal Palace was built in 1738 at the behest of the king of Naples, Charles of Bourbon, and his wife, Amalia of Saxony, fascinated by the landscapes of the South. Engineers, architects and decorators worked on its realization, from Giovanni Antonio Medrano to Antonio Canevari, from Luigi Vanvitelli to Ferdinando Fuga; Giuseppe Canart, Giuseppe Bonito and Vincenzo Re worked for the interior decoration, Francesco Geri for the park and gardens. The site of Portici, chosen by King Charles for landscape reasons and for resources suitable for hunting, turned out to be deeply imbued with buried memories: with each excavation of the earth, necessary for the construction of new buildings, some marvel of the past re-emerged to light. The finds, coming from the buried cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, turned out to be rich and numerous and were placed in the rooms of the Royal Palace. Soon the finds formed one of the most famous collections in the world and gave life to the Herculanense Museum, inaugurated in 1758 and a privileged destination on the Grand Tour. To access the Palace from the sea, the port of Granatello was built in 1773. In the early nineteenth century the archaeological collections were transferred to Naples and formed the nucleus of the current National Archaeological Museum. Let's take a look at the façade, the valley forest and the internal courtyard of the Palace, connected to the urban road network, from which the monumental complex is accessed by car:
Access to the Palace is limited for various reasons, first of all the presence of the prestigious Faculty of Agriculture of the Federico II University of Naples. As for the physically disabled, they must have a free ticket at the ticket office (there is a step at the entrance); the staff will indicate the elevator to go up to the first floor, where you can visit the Herculanense Museum. At the end of the visit we must return to the ticket office where the staff will accompany us to the accessible entrance of the Botanical Garden of Portici, adjacent to the upper wood that climbs towards Vesuvius. Let's start with some images of the Herculanense Museum, which develops inside what used to be the noble floor of the Reggia, with the richly frescoed royal apartments, overlooking the wood sloping down to the sea; the museum, given the choice to transfer all the original finds of Herculaneum and Pompeii that were collected there to the Archaeological Museum of Naples, contains luminous panels, models, prints, engravings of the '700 and reproductions of statues today in Naples, all accompanied by excellent illustrative panels that make the visit very interesting:
But in reality there is an original statue of Herculaneum, albeit with its own particular history: it is the Flora, an ancient Roman statue on which the artist Giuseppe Canart intervened with a restoration and reconstruction of the lost parts, a process that generated what is rightly considered a masterpiece:
The statue was originally placed in the Botanical Garden; later, to protect it from bad weather, it was moved to the royal apartments, which gives us the opportunity to describe, with some images, the Botanical Garden of Portici:
During our visit we were able to admire the Mutatio Formae exhibition with the works of the sculptor Pasquale Simonetti, expertly scattered in the royal apartments, of which we show you some images:
We conclude the visit to the Royal Palace of Portici by referring to what is hoped for by many, namely that in the near future what today is a splendid container, as well as hosting prestigious art exhibitions, will somehow be restored to its status as a palace by relocating to the inside, at least in part, the furnishings that have ended up in other royal residences. As for lunch, we would certainly like to suggest you take a few kilometers of road to get to the prestigious seafood restaurant: La voce del mare (*): Via Spiaggia del Fronte 22, Torre del Greco 081 3580406/333 248 4584 www.ristorantelavocedelmare.it (*) symbol indicating the presence of toilets equipped for the disabled