The mysterious object at the Royal Palace of Caserta
What was discovered in 1861?
In 1861, immediately after the unification of Italy, officials from Piedmont arrive at the Royal Palace of Caserta with a specific task: to carry out a room-by-room inventory of all the furnishings left behind by the Bourbons. It’s a lengthy task, involving inventories, seals, and packed furniture, but in one of the rooms that once belonged to Maria Carolina of Habsburg-Lorraine, wife of Ferdinand IV of Bourbon, the officials pause, looking perplexed. In front of them is an object they have never seen before: a shallow, oval-shaped basin with a tap on the side. None of them can explain what it’s used for. And so, without spending too much time on it, they recorded it in the inventory report using a phrase which, even today, more than a century and a half later, still brings a smile to the face of anyone who reads it.
“An unidentified object shaped like a guitar has been found.”
That object was a bidet, first introduced in Italy in the very rooms of the Royal Palace of Caserta, decades before it became a common feature in Italian bathrooms. One detail that speaks volumes about just how far ahead the Bourbon court was: while the Savoy officials did not even recognise its purpose, in Caserta it had already been in use for some time, amidst frescoes and gilded ceilings.
It’s one of the stories we most enjoy telling our guests, perhaps over breakfast, when someone asks us why Hotel Regina draws so much inspiration from the Royal Palace of Caserta. The answer is always the same: because those who lived here, amidst all their splendour, were also surprisingly ahead of their time, long before the rest of Italy realised it. Much like we hope to be every day, as we have welcomed guests since 1996: paying attention to every detail, even the smallest ones, such as that side tap that nobody recognised back in 1861.
