The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Campania
6 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful sacred places in Campania are Certosa di Padula, Certosa di San Martino and Amalfi Cathedral. The list covers 6 sacred places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Campania's sacred places reach both upwards and underground. Naples sits on soft yellow tuff that was easy to dig, so from early Christian times the city buried its dead in galleries cut into the hills, and centuries later it reused old quarries as ossuaries. Above ground, the wealth of the Kingdom of Naples paid for monasteries and chapels in which Baroque art was pushed to its most theatrical.
The Certosa di Padula, a Carthusian monastery in the Vallo di Diano, is one of the largest in Europe, built around a great cloister of vast proportions. In Naples, the Certosa di San Martino stands on the Vomero hill next to Castel Sant'Elmo, its church and cloister reworked in rich Baroque marble with the whole bay spread out beneath it.
Below the hill of Capodimonte, the Catacombs of San Gennaro preserve early Christian tombs and frescoes on two levels, linked with the city's patron saint. The Fontanelle cemetery, a cave in the Sanità district, is filled with skulls and bones from past epidemics, which Neapolitans once adopted and cared for in a popular cult. In the historic centre, the Cappella Sansevero holds Giuseppe Sanmartino's Veiled Christ, a marble figure under a shroud so thin it seems transparent, together with the enigmatic works commissioned by Prince Raimondo di Sangro.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Certosa di Padula | Carthusian monastery | ✓ |
| 2 | Certosa di San Martino | Carthusian monastery | |
| 3 | Amalfi Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 4 | Catacombs of San Gennaro | Catacombs | |
| 5 | Fontanelle cemetery | Catacombs | |
| 6 | Cappella Sansevero | Church building |
01 Certosa di Padula
Italy · 36.1 km from Potenza40.337° N 15.652° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by gvizzari0 from Pixabay Almost nothing of the Gothic foundation shows today. From 1583 until the late eighteenth century the monks rebuilt the complex in the Baroque manner, adding a facade crowned with statues and pinnacles that was finished only in 1723, and an elliptical grand staircase in an octagonal tower, completed in 1779 as the last major work before the monks were expelled. A separate spiral staircase of white marble leads up to the library.
Did you know? Before the monks were expelled the library held some 20,000 volumes; only about a tenth remain, the rest dispersed or sent to Naples.
02 Certosa di San Martino
Italy · 0.2 km from Naples40.843° N 14.241° E
Pinotto992 · Public domain The house was founded in 1325 by Charles, Duke of Calabria, the eldest son of King Robert of Anjou, and its first architects were Tino di Camaino and Francesco di Vito, who were building the neighbouring castle at the same time. It was consecrated in 1368 under Queen Joan I. Little of the Gothic monastery shows above ground, though its vaulted undergrounds, cut into the hill, opened to the public only in 2015.
Did you know? The terraced hanging gardens cover about seven hectares and still use water channels laid out in the 17th and 18th centuries.
03 Amalfi Cathedral
Duomo di Amalfi
Italy · 15 km from Salerno40.634° N 14.603° E
Luca Aless · CC BY-SA 3.0 The first church on the site was built in the 9th century on the ruins of an earlier temple; it now houses the diocesan museum. A second church went up beside it to the south in the 10th century, and that is the present cathedral. By the 12th century the two had been joined into a single Romanesque church of six aisles, reduced to five in the 13th century to make room for the Cloister of Paradise, a courtyard in the Arab-Norman style.
Did you know? Andrea dell'Asta painted the Miracle of the Manna for the cathedral in 1710, depicting the liquid said to gather at Saint Andrew's tomb.
04 Catacombs of San Gennaro
Catacombe di San Gennaro
Italy · 2.5 km from Naples40.864° N 14.248° E
Dominik Matus · CC BY-SA 4.0 Devotion made the catacombs grow: galleries were lengthened, new chambers opened and painted, and when the walls were full, graves were dug into the floor. Several of the finest images of early Christian Naples are here. Near the entrance is the oldest known portrait of San Gennaro, from the fifth century, showing the saint between a woman and a girl.
Did you know? From the 13th to the 18th century the galleries suffered heavy looting, and modern excavations only began in 1971.
05 Fontanelle cemetery
Cimitero delle Fontanelle
Italy · 1.8 km from Naples40.858° N 14.239° E
Lalupa · CC BY-SA 3.0 The quarries supplied building stone for the city until about 1600. The bones began to arrive with the plague of 1656, which killed at least 300,000 people in the city, and kept coming for almost two centuries: remains cleared from crowded church burial vaults, and the dead of the cholera epidemic of the 1830s.
Did you know? Devotees often asked their adopted skulls for lottery numbers, and if the numbers failed, the skull could be abandoned for another.
06 Cappella Sansevero
Italy · 1.3 km from Naples40.849° N 14.255° E
David Sivyer · CC BY-SA 2.0 The chapel's origins go back to 1590, when Giovan Francesco di Sangro founded it after recovering from an illness, and in 1613 Alessandro di Sangro turned it into the burial chapel of the family. Its present appearance is due to Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of Sansevero, a scientist, inventor and freemason, who in the mid-18th century rebuilt and redecorated it as a single, coherent programme full of symbolic meaning.
Did you know? Ten allegorical Virtues line the walls: nine honour wives of the Sangro princes, while Disillusion is dedicated to Raimondo's father.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful sacred places in Campania?
- On our list, Certosa di Padula ranks first, followed by Certosa di San Martino and Amalfi Cathedral.
- What is the Veiled Christ?
- It is a marble sculpture of the dead Christ covered by a thin shroud, carved by Giuseppe Sanmartino in 1753 for the Cappella Sansevero in Naples. The veil is carved from the same block as the body.
- What is a certosa?
- A certosa is a Carthusian monastery, called a charterhouse in English. Carthusian monks lived in separate cells around a large cloister, which is why houses like Padula and San Martino are so extensive.
- Why is the Fontanelle cemetery full of skulls?
- The cave in the Sanità district was used as an ossuary for victims of epidemics such as the plague of 1656 and for remains cleared from city churches. Later, local people adopted individual skulls and tended them in a devotional cult.
- How many sacred places are on this list in Campania?
- The list covers 6 sacred places.