Vanvitelli's original letters digitized. Among them, that of the beginning of construction of the Royal Palace of Caserta.

The original letters of Luigi Vanvitelli (Naples, 1700 - Caserta, 1773) have been digitized, thanks to the painstaking work of theHistorical Archives of the Royal Palace of Caserta: more than 1,500 documents have been transformed into TIFF format and will soon be available online in the museum’s database.

The loose papers were written by the celebrated architect between 1751 and 1768 and are mainly addressed to his brother Urbano and wife Olimpia Starich. The epistolary is kept in sixteen fascicles inside neutral pH protective boxes at the Palatine Library. The file for the year 1758, which contains eighty letters on eighty-two sheets, was kindly loaned by the Società di Storia Patria di Terra di Lavoro. In the coming years, the precious documentation will be the subject of restoration work in order to slow down the oxidation of the inks and repair mechanical damage to the paper support.

Among the digitized documents is a letter dated May 25, 1751: it is from this that the story of the construction of the Royal Palace of Caserta begins. In fact, in the letter, the architect tells his brother, the abbot of the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini in Rome, that he had to go to Caserta, by order of the king, to draw in the company of a master builder and a chief stonemason the perimeter on which the Royal Palace would be built. King Charles of Bourbon presented the chosen design to the court and allocated a sum of 50,000 ducats a year for the work, setting January 1, 1752 as the ceremony for laying the foundation stone.

With this in mind, the Directorate of the Royal Palace of Caserta has planned a major digitization of the archival holdings of the Vanvitellian Complex, which will continue in the coming months with the oldest fonds of the collection.

Vanvitelli's original letters digitized. Among them, that of the beginning of construction of the Royal Palace of Caserta.

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