Museo di Capodimonte

When Charles of Bourbon became king of Naples in the 1730s, he inherited through his mother one of the greatest art collections in Italy, the Farnese collection, built up over two centuries by a family of popes and cardinals. He needed somewhere to put it, and on a hill above the city he raised a vast red palace, Capodimonte, first as a hunting lodge and then as a gallery.

The Farnese pictures are still the core: Titian's portraits of the aging Pope Paul III, Parmigianino's cool and elegant "Antea," a room of Renaissance masters from Raphael to Bruegel. To them Naples later added its own, including Caravaggio's "Flagellation of Christ," painted for a church in the city during the violent stretch he spent here on the run. Around the paintings the royal apartments survive, with their porcelain and their long views back down over Naples and the bay.