Explore "The Extraordinary Confessions of Diana Please" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Caserta Palace was a sort of Versailles to the Palazzo Reale. It was a fine, long, rectangular building, lofty and imposing in the eighteenth century style of grand architecture, with marble colonnades and innumerable windows. The town it dominated, being a royal town _par excellence_, was comparatively clean and reposeful; and the palace gardens were as extensive and as beautiful as any in the world.
It was not, however, to a corner of this stately pile that I found myself committed, but to rooms in the Casino of St. Lucius, which stood in the park some two miles north of the main building, and commanded a noble view, not only of the surrounding country, but of the dark pruned alleys beset with white statues, and the terraces and fountains and cascades of the gardens themselves -- a lovely spot. And here, for the moment secure and at peace, I resolved upon a life of placid enchantment, treated like a queen's hostage, and biding the development of events.