Certosa e Museo di San Martino

A fourteenth-century Carthusian monastery reborn in baroque marble, the Certosa di San Martino crowns the Vomero hill with cloisters, a church frescoed by Lanfranco and Ribera, and a museum whose nativity scenes, carriages and city views hold three centuries of Neapolitan life.

Why it matters

Few buildings summarise Naples as completely as San Martino. Founded in 1325 by Charles of Calabria, son of King Robert of Anjou, the charterhouse began as a Gothic monastery on works entrusted to Tino di Camaino, the leading Sienese sculptor-architect of the day; his great vaulted undercrofts still survive below the church. Over the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the monks and their patrons refashioned the complex into one of the showpieces of Neapolitan baroque, and the long involvement of Cosimo Fanzago, who worked here from 1623 to 1656, left its mark on cloisters, stairways and marble inlay throughout. Painters and sculptors of the first rank worked on its rooms: Lanfranco, Jusepe de Ribera, Massimo Stanzione, Luca Giordano, Pietro Bernini, Giuseppe Sammartino.

When the religious orders were suppressed in the newly unified state, the complex became a museum almost immediately: Giuseppe Fiorelli established it in 1866 and it opened to the public in 1867. The result is a museum that is also its own greatest exhibit — monks' quarters, apothecary, prior's loggia and gardens remain in place around the collections.

What to notice

Begin with the church. The single nave floor in polychrome marble was designed by Fanzago and completed by Bonaventura Presti in 1665; the vault carries Lanfranco's frescoes of 1636 to 1639, Ribera painted the prophets of 1638 to 1643, and Stanzione's Pietà of 1638 hangs among the altars. In the sacristy, marquetry panels made between 1587 and 1600 sit under frescoes by Cavalier d'Arpino and Stanzione.

Then the Great Cloister, enlarged from 1581 by Giovanni Antonio Dosio and given its final form by Fanzago: octagonal pillars, the monks' cemetery garden, and a silence that survives the crowds. The museum sections around it hold the city's collective memory. The nativity section is the richest collection of eighteenth-century nativity figures anywhere in Naples, pivoting on the Cuciniello presepe, about eight hundred figures arranged in a theatrical grotto with simulated day and night lighting since its inauguration in 1879. The paintings section preserves the Tavola Strozzi of 1472–73, the first painted view of Naples, showing the city and its Aragonese fleet; nearby hangs the Cona dei Lani of 1517, the largest painted terracotta complex of the southern Renaissance, rescued from a chapel destroyed by bombing in 1943. Carriages, the theatrical section with a model of the San Carlino puppet stage, and Corradini's bozzetto for the Veiled Christ complete the circuit. Note that the naval section and the Gothic underground rooms are currently excluded from the visiting route.

Context and history

The charterhouse's fortunes track Naples'. Gothic under the Angevins, monastic wealth under the Aragonese, baroque splendour under the viceroys and Bourbons — the monks retained the site until the suppressions, briefly returned under the 1799 upheavals' aftermath, and left for good in 1812 when the building became a military invalids' home. Its conversion into a national museum in 1866–67 was among Italy's first acts of architectural heritage policy, folding the monastery's own rooms into the display. Standing beside Castel Sant'Elmo, it completed the Vomero hill as the scenic and defensive crown of the city, a role the Grand Tour already celebrated from the prior's loggia.