Setting History Straight and Relocating King Carlos III

Let’s not be beastly to the royals.

For myself, I’m all on the side of King Carlos III. It would be very ungrateful of me if I were not, seeing that he sheltered me for many years in the city he ordained, El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles, and for several weeks in the palace he built at Caserta when he was King of Naples and the Two Sicilies.

During World War II the royal palace at Caserta was headquarters for the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces in Italy. But some GIs were not kind to the palace and its furnishings, so everyone was ordered out of the palace and into a tent city set up in a nearby swamp.

I preferred the palace. I stayed on in a room on the sixth floor, lighting my corner of the huge chamber with an electric light strung out to the generator belonging to Gen. Lauris Norstad, who lived in a trailer hidden in a copse behind the palace.

The empty corridors were spooky at night, and I never went near the throne room. In the morning, in order to see if my Jeep was still in the courtyard below, I had to crawl on my belly over the six-foot window embrasure.

It may have been a tough life, living in his palace, but I don’t blame King Carlos III for that.

ROBERT CORNTHWAITE

Herperia