Caserta (Casert in Caserta dialect) is an Italian town of 73 770
inhabitants, capital of the homonymous province in Campania.
The city of Campania is known above all for its imposing Bourbon
Palace, known as the Versailles of Italy, which, together with the
Royal Belvedere of San Leucio and the Carolino Aqueduct, has been
included in the Unesco World Heritage Site since 1997.
In addition to the capital, the municipality of
Caserta also includes 23 hamlets, for a total area of 56 km².
Among these we must mention San Leucio, a separate municipality
aggregated to Caserta under Fascism, famous for the Real Belvedere
and the silk factories, and Casertavecchia, with its medieval
village, the castle and the Cathedral, dating back to 1100, in
Arab-Romanesque style.
The city is seamlessly linked from an
urbanistic point of view with other important centers of the
province, in particular with Marcianise to the south, where most of
the industries of the Caserta area are concentrated and with Santa
Maria Capua Vetere to the north, where they are present. the Court
and the remains of a Roman amphitheater. For some years the
municipality of Caserta has been the leader of some initiatives,
which include various neighboring municipalities for a total
population of about four hundred thousand inhabitants, which have
the purpose of agreeing on a single and homogeneous territorial
development plan.
Caserta is located in a strategic position
with respect to the major road axes. In particular, it is served by
two exits of the A1, one called "Caserta sud", located in the
territory of the nearby municipality of Marcianise, and the other
called "Caserta nord", located on the border between the
municipalities of Caserta, Casapulla and Casagiove. .
Caserta
is also located in the center of via Sannitica, the road
commissioned by the Bourbons.
In the 2013 urban ecosystem
classification drawn up by Legambiente, the municipality of Caserta
is in 34th place out of 45 provincial capitals with a population of
less than 80,000 inhabitants and, overall, reports an index (38.23%)
lower than that of all other provincial capitals of Campania.
In the province of Caserta there is the largest flat
area in the region and this is also affected by the climate.
The part that goes from the coast to the first mountains that
surround the capital, is affected by the beneficial influences of
the sea, which are felt especially in winter with mild temperatures
and higher humidity (and consequent moderately or even intensely
muggy climate in the summer months). Summer is very long and hot,
with a strong accentuation that took place starting from 1998, as in
all of peninsular Italy, although a second step took place with the
historic summer of 2003. The wave of heat of August 2007, with over
40 ° recorded at the Caserta meteorological station, in this case,
however, with a low humidity rate due to the falling winds but not
dissimilar values were also recorded at the beginning of the
second decade of August 2003 and again in July 2015 and August 2017,
in the last case with a dew point higher than on previous occasions
and extreme physical discomfort.
The winter in the Caserta
plain is mild overall (the weather station of Caserta, located in
the city center and influenced by the heat island, records about 13
° in the average of the maximum temperatures in January, against
about 12 ° of the average 81 / 10 of the station of the military
airport of Grazzanise), but periods (hardly long, given the upward
trend in temperatures in recent decades) of intense cold are not to
be excluded (to cite a few recent examples, relatively rigid was the
two-month period of December 2001 - January 2002, with a short snowy
episode, as well as the period between the second half of January
and the beginning of March 2005, after the mild December 2004, while
the winter 2003-2004 is remembered for the six cold waves ,
alternating with mild periods), with sporadically zero lows even in
the capital and highs below 7 degrees, despite the heat island of
the urban conurbation north of Naples, which affects a lot thermal
averages.
The snow index is still one of the lowest in Italy
and even in Europe, much more negligible than in Italian cities
located at the same latitude, such as Bari, which are less rainy
(the Tyrrhenian side is downwind of the raid of continental air from
the east with respect to the Adriatic side). In the present century,
the most significant snow episode occurred between 26 and 27
February 2018 but the one that occurred between 30 and 31 December
2014 is not negligible (for more significant accumulations it is
necessary to go back to the two-year period 1985-86, although minor
episodes there were also in January 2019 (accumulations of 3 cm. in
the night between 3 and 4), March 2002 (flakes without accumulation,
on Palm Sunday), in March 2005 - limited to the hilly areas - and in
December 2010, while between 16 and 17 December 2010 there were
minimum temperatures below -4 ° in the city center (value replicated
on the nights of 6 and 7 January 2017) and even close to -7 ° in the
nearby military airport of Grazzanise.
In the hilly hamlets the average temperatures are slightly lower,
especially in the maximum values and snowfalls are a little less
rare (Casertavecchia, to remain in the current century, was affected
by snowfall, for example, in January 2004 and March 2005, that did
not involve the flat city or in other cases involved it marginally,
as in February 2012 and February 2013).
The microclimate of
the Matese area is very different from the coast and the Caserta
plain. The internal area of the province is in fact characterized by
numerous hilly and mountainous reliefs, which have a typically
Apennine climate.