Certosa di San Giacomo

Founded between 1371 and 1374 by Giacomo Arcucci, grand chamberlain to Queen Giovanna I of Anjou, the Certosa di San Giacomo is the most important building surviving from Angevin Capri. Cloisters, church and terraced gardens now share their quiet with two museums: one devoted to a German painter who made the island his home, the other to its Roman past.

Why it matters

Capri is famous for scenery, but the Certosa is its monument of record — the greatest architectural testimony of the Angevin period on the island, raised at the command of Giacomo Arcucci for Queen Giovanna I at the end of the fourteenth century. Its bulk anchors the ridge above Marina Piccola. Inside, the charterhouse keeps the two-part body of a Carthusian house: the casa alta with church, refectory, cloisters, chapter hall and the prior's lodging, and the casa bassa where the lay brothers worked — storerooms, kitchens, cellars. Since 1974 the complex has also housed the museum of Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, and since 2024 the island's National Archaeological Museum, bringing together evidence from fourteenth-, nineteenth- and twenty-first-century Capri.

What to notice

The great cloister, remodelled in the mid-sixteenth century by Felice de Felice to a design by Giovanni Antonio Dosio, has cross vaults carried on slender stone columns. The smaller cloister has vaults resting on reused Roman marble columns. In the church, a rectangular hall of three groin vaults received Baroque frescoes between 1699 and 1710 from Diodato Vespiniani and Francesco Mottola, pupils of Solimena and Luca Giordano. The gardens include aromatic and medicinal plants among olive, pomegranate, citrus and fig trees and vines. The former refectory holds Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach's paintings, made with pigments mixed with sand, gravel, grass and bitumen.

Context and history

The monastery's centuries were restless. Turkish pirates burned and sacked the house in the sixteenth century, and seventeenth-century restoration followed; the Carthusians were expelled in 1808, after which the building served as a hospice for veterans and then a prison. The nineteenth infantry regiment was billeted here during the First World War, and American troops occupied it in the Second, running a rest home for pilots. In 1932 the Futurists — Marinetti among them — dreamed of turning the pile into Italy's "Artopoli", a city of art; the scheme came to nothing. From 1936 the Augustinian Canons kept a school and a library of more than three thousand volumes until their departure in 1961, between restorations led from 1926 by the superintendent Gino Chierici and renewed in the 1970s under Raffaello Causa. It was Causa who opened the Diefenbach museum to the public on 12 September 1974, around a core of works donated in 1971 by the painter's grandson Friedrich Fridolin von Spaun. Diefenbach had arrived on Capri in December 1899, lived there until his death in 1913, and left behind a painting collection now numbered in thirty-two canvases with five sculptures and a model of the island.