Oriental atmospheres and desert plants at the Reggia di Portici

The Chinese Room crossed by exotic scenes, populated by characters with oriental features against the backdrop of vertical palaces more difficult to identify as 'Mandarin' buildings, is one of the artistic marvels one comes across when visiting the Bourbon Palace of Portici. The Campanian painter Antonio Cipullo had never been to Beijing, so he relied on the illustrations of other travellers and his own imagination. The monumental staircase with frescos pretending more pompous and monumental Baroque perspectives is also illusory. On the other hand, the orange grove and the botanical garden surrounded by walls created in 1872, rich in marble busts and fountains, magnolias, araucarias, are all real: the palm grove is also very luxuriant, home to twenty-five different species, as is the dense fern forest. Among the botanical miracles of the greenhouses, on the other hand, the snake-like Welwitschia mirabilis, with its large, hard, dry leaves, 'crawls' over the ground as if this were the Namibian desert to which it is most accustomed. Not far from the Reggia, you can reach the Pietrarsa National Railway Museum: it overlooks the Gulf of Naples and is housed in what used to be the Bourbon workshops where carriages and old trains are now housed.