The Heroic Frenzies of Caserta

After visiting the Royal Palace of Caserta, looking out from the rear façade, so much more sumptuous than the front, your eyes still brimming over with all the gold and stucco you have seen, you will set out through Vanvitelli’s splendid, harmoniously composed garden toward the waterfall and its sculptural groups of Diana and Actaeon, envisioned by Neapolitan Tommaso Solari. Two centuries earlier, another native of Campania, Giordano Bruno of Nola, had revealed in his dialogues De gli eroici furori the philosophical and initiatory meaning of the myth of a hunter who glimpses the naked goddess and, for that affront, is transformed into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds. To avoid the same fate, you the visitor are invited to turn right into the English Garden, immortalized by Massimo Listri’s photographs. Enveloped in the rustle of its foliage, Antonio Soldi explains, you will follow an initiatory path and arrive at another bath, that of Venus. This time you may gaze freely, without fear of punishment, because your gaze will have been purified: lust, to paraphrase an old saying, is in the eye of the beholder.