San Leucio is something more than one of the many “Bourbon sites”: it represented a revolutionary socio-economic institution.

Its area was chosen by Ferdinand IV in the ‘60s after the completion of the work at the Royal Palace of Caserta. In those years, the young king took the habit of residing more often in Caserta, whose surrounding areas were an ideal location for his favourite sport, hunting. The Sovereign himself wrote a volume on this matter, whose title was Origine della popolazione di San Leucio (Origin of San Leucio’s Population) , printed in 1789, in which we read: «In the magnificent palace of Caserta, whose construction was begun by my august father and continued by me, I did not find silence and solitude to meditate and rest my spirit; but another city in the middle of the countryside, with the same luxury and magnificence of the capital; and therefore, to find a more secluded place, almost a retreat, I thought of San Leucio’s hill. Hence the origin of this colony».

S. Leucio: houses

Once chosen San Leucio’s reserve, in 1773 he decided to build a lodge, later called “Vaccheria”, destined to rest during the hunting. A tragic event took place in this house in 1778 : the Crown Prince Charles Titus died there.

The garden Italian style and the Belvedere

Since then the two Sovereigns, overcome with grief, did not want to reside there any more; however, the King decided to use it for other purposes, to draw some useful advantage from it . Very close to the “Vaccheria” there was the only baronial lodge of the Acquaviva family. Ferdinand had a brilliant idea: he tasked architect Francesco Collecini, one of Vanvitelli’s students, to widen and transform the Belvedere construction into a royal silk mill with the aim of building around it a large site of textile spinning mills, a real “industrial city”, to populate with workers and to be ruled by special laws, regulations and life practices.

The first silk mills were located in the same structure; then in 1805 the “Filanda dei Cipressi” was built and enlarged in 1823 by the realization of a superstructure called “coccolliera” (cocoon warehouse) to store the cocoons obtained by silkworms.
The houses of the mill manager and the parish priest were located inside the structure, as well as a school, rooms where to spin and wring the silk and dye it, the house of the school mistress and that of the machinery supervisor. The royal apartment was located at the upper floor, in direct contact, through a corridor, with the loom room.

There were also other rooms for dancing and dining; the Queen’s bathroom was very peculiar: designed as an ancient thermal bath with a large “calidarium” bathtub in an oval shape made of stone from Mondragone and embedded into the floor and filled with hot water through a stove located in the room below, it had walls decorated with frescoes by Philip Hackert . As already said, the King populated this site with workers for the silk mills and built a real “city-state”, with precise regulations and practices of its own.

The fountain by A. Solari

In his book, Ferdinand IV explains his worries about the education of the workers’ children, the support of their family and a peaceful work situation, so that each man and woman could get one’s living from his or her work and never be idle, since the Devil ds work for idle hands.