Caserta Palace

A Friday off means go visit a touristy place to avoid weekend crowds so we decided to head to Caserta Palace (a Unesco, World Heritage Site).  Only a few miles from our home and an easy half day exploration in mind, off we went in hopes of a nice day, what we found was far better.  We spent about 4 hours wandering the grounds and gardens and didn’t even make it through the palace.  At that point we were pretty worn out so we will save the palace and the rest of the gardens (no, we didn’t see all of the gardens either !) for the next visit.

Palace Front

Palace Entry

The Queue

One of many courtyards

An Artistic side

The front entry is pretty impressive and after purchasing tickets we walked through a couple of huge courtyards and discovered an artist had a show on the grounds throughout with his sculpted animals. Cute!  The back side of the palace was under renovation and there were huge colorful frogs going up the wall.  It was a really fun addition.

Through to the Gardens in the back you find a long path with beautiful scenery to each side.  As you walk the path and pass by trees and shrubs you spot statues on both sides.  Further down is the start of a very long pool with fish and at the end is a gorgeous fountain with a sea monster in the middle and fish on either side.

Continue on with another long pool which has a waterfall with so many statues around it in different poses.  There was so much to see, the pictures don’t do it justice.

Past the waterfall the pool continues and a slow incline is felt and there are multiple tiers to this part of the pool which is actually an aqueduct.  You might notice two different fountains in the photos below, there were two at different levels of the aqueduct we were climbing up.

Very Long Pool with a waterfall at the very top

Awesome color of dragonflies (fairies) here!

This section had tiers, it’s a working aqueduct.

At the top there is a huge waterfall with fountains and statues around the bottom.  I’m not showing one of them because…you gotta go to know…but one scene was of Diana and her nymphs.  Fantastic!  I was excited and surprised.  To the right of the scene was the entrance to the English Tea Garden which we walked maybe 1/3 of before calling it quits knowing we had to walk all the way back to the palace then to the car.

There were some pretty amazing trees in the English Tea Garden and a massive green house, we found a little gazebo and just a lot of gorgeous nature.  It was a fantastic day and we were wiped out but excited to go back to finish the exploration.  I found out they have an annual pass for the gardens section, people were running and biking for exercise as well as having a picnic and just lazying under the trees.  I might be getting that pass and doing some of that too!