Description
Book SynopsisTraces the history of three massive palaces built outside Naples in the eighteenth century—at Capodimonte, Portici, and Caserta—and examines how these buildings were designed to help reshape the economic and cultural fortunes of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
Trade Review“In sparkling prose, Thomas argues that three remarkable palaces in Naples were not only important works of architecture but embodiments of Enlightenment ideals. These buildings have never been considered together in print nor have their larger cultural ambitions been discussed. Built on learned foundations of eighteenth-century printed and archival sources, much of it unpublished, Palaces of Reason serves to put Naples back in its proper place as a key artistic and intellectual center of the 1700s.”
—Heather Hyde Minor,author of The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome and Piranesi's Lost Words
“Palaces of Reason orders and animates one of the most ambitious and complex architectural programmes of eighteenth-century Europe. No author has studied the three Bourbon palaces of Naples together in this way and provided such an original and well-researched analysis.”
—Melissa Calaresu,Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge
