The Royal Palace was completed as planned: the palace has some 1200 rooms, two dozen state apartments, a royal theater modelled after the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. The population of Caserta Vecchia was shifted 10 km to be available to the new palace. A silk manufactory at San Leucio was disguised as a pavilion in the immense parkland. When King Carlo had first seen Vanvitelli's grandly-scaled model for Caserta it filled him with emotion "fit to tear his heart from his breast". But in the end, he never slept a night at Caserta, which was completed for Ferdinand.
As at Versailles, a major aqueduct was required to bring water for the prodigal water displays. Like Versailles, the palace was designed to function as the heart and brain of a centralized, absolute Bourbon monarchy: more than a series of Late Baroque parade apartments for diplomacy and show, more than suitable housing for the royal family and the court of the Kingdom of Naples, Caserta was planned to house the offices of government bureaucracy, barracks in the outbuildings, a national library, a university, and a national theater.
The fountains and cascades, each filling a vasca ("basin"), with architecture and hydraulics by Luigi Vanvitelli at intervals along a wide straight canal that runs to the horizon, rivalled those at Peterhof outside St Petersburg: the Fountain of Diana and Actaeon (sculptures by Paolo Persico, Brunelli, Pietro Solari); The Fountain of Venus and Adonis (1770-80); The Fountain of the Dolphins (1773-80); the Fountain of Aeolus; the Fountain of Ceres. A large population of figures from classical Antiquity were modelled by Gaetano Salomone for the Caserta gardens and excuted by large workshops. In the 1780s, an early Continental example of an "English garden" in the svelte naturalistic taste of Capability Brown was added, to designs by Giovanni Antonio Graefer; the landscape garden is a mark of the influence at the court of Naples of Sir John Acton the British consul.