The construction of the palace began in 1752 In the end, Charles never slept a night at the
Reggia, as he abdicated in 1759 to become
King of Spain. This was part of the entire concept of the palace when
Mario Gioffredo first proposed it in 1750. According to
George L. Hersey, the proposal envisaged a palace "that was a virtual city, housing not just the court and king but all the main political and cultural elites of the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily - university, museum, library, cabinet bureaus, military high commands, and so on." The population of
Caserta Vecchia was moved to provide a workforce closer to the palace. A silk factory at
San Leucio was disguised as a pavilion in the parkland. Another of the king's primary objectives was to have a new royal court and administrative center for the kingdom in a location protected from sea attack and distant from the revolt-prone and congested city of Naples. Troop barracks were housed within the palace to provide the king with suitable protection. Vanvitelli died in 1773 and the construction was continued by his son
Carlo and then by other architects; but the elder Vanvitelli's original project, which included a pair of frontal wings similar to Bernini's colonnades at
St. Peter's Square, was never finished. In 1861, with the birth of the
Kingdom of Italy,
Savoyard officials surveyed the contents of the Palace. The
bidet was inventoried as follows: "strange object in the shape of a guitar". From 1923 to 1943, the palace was the location of the
Accademia Aeronautica, the Italian Air Force Academy. From 1943, during the allied invasion, the royal palace served as
Allied Force Headquarters for the
Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean area; Sir
Maitland Wilson, and later Sir
Harold Alexander. It became associated with the Allied occupation and with the 29 April 1945 signing of the surrender of German forces in Italy, an episode later commemorated by the museum and local institutions in the exhibition
La Reggia liberata. L’occupazione militare alleata, la resa tedesca, la restituzione all’Italia. 1943–1947. In April 1945, the palace was the site of the signing of the unconditional
surrender of German and Italian RSI forces in Italy. The agreement covered between 600,000 and 900,000 soldiers along the Italian Front, including troops in sections of Austria. The first
Allied war crimes trial took place in the palace in 1945; German general
Anton Dostler was sentenced to death and executed nearby, in
Aversa. In the left-hand arc behind the façade, a set of barracks was built, referred to in the papers of Lt. Gen.
John C. H. Lee as the "Cascade Camp." During
World War II, the soldiers of the
US Fifth Army recovered here in a "rest center." The Palace of Caserta suffered its most serious documented wartime damage during World War II. In September 1943 an aerial bombardment struck the palace, with the
Palatine Chapel sustaining the gravest losses. The chapel had contained eight large eighteenth-century canvases commissioned by
Charles of Bourbon and
Maria Amalia of Saxony from artists including
Sebastiano Conca,
Giuseppe Bonito and
Anton Raphael Mengs. Almost all of these paintings were destroyed, together with parts of the ceiling and columns, the organs, sculptures and valuable sacred furnishings. The altar painting of the
Immaculate Conception, attributed to Giuseppe Bonito, is recorded by the museum as the only surviving canvas from the chapel’s original pictorial cycle. Separately, in 2025 the museum announced a programme to create publicly accessible storage areas for historical-artistic objects that had not formed part of the public visitor offer. According to the Reggia, a survey of the palace and park had identified objects dispersed through the complex, often without an organic location or secure archival references. The programme includes the recovery, cataloguing, digitization and conservation of paintings, frames, furnishings, stone material, paper documents, applied arts, textiles, sacred vestments, presepe elements and other objects. The complex has also suffered later accidental and structural damage. On 4 November 1998, shortly after the site’s inscription on the
World Heritage List, a fire broke out in part of the attic of the palace.
UNESCO recorded that the damage was restricted to less monumental spaces and the roof, and that restoration works had begun. In December 2017 a large section of plaster fell in the
Sala delle Dame di Compagnia; no one was injured and the museum director stated that there was no structural damage. The collapse was linked in contemporary reports to earlier repair methods after the
1930 Irpinia earthquake and to later consolidation work, with the affected area described as close to the part of the royal apartment that had suffered the worst damage in the
1980 Irpinia earthquake. The palace, park,
Aqueduct Carolino and
San Leucio complex remain part of a
UNESCO World Heritage Site. ==Layout of the palace==