Certosa di Pavia

Carthusian monks were meant to live in silence and plainness, which makes the Certosa di Pavia one of the great contradictions of Italian art: a charterhouse for a handful of hermits whose church front is among the most lavishly carved façades of the Renaissance. Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the first Duke of Milan, laid the foundation stone on 27 August 1396 at the far end of his hunting park between Milan and Pavia, intending the church as a dynastic mausoleum after the Milanese had resisted his plans to use their cathedral for the purpose. Marco Solari began the work; the Solari family, and later Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, carried it on for a century, and the church was consecrated in 1497.

The building records that century of changing taste. The nave, finished in 1465, is Gothic, with cross vaults painted alternately with geometric patterns and starry skies, a small-scale echo of Milan Cathedral. The façade, begun in the 1490s, belongs wholly to the Lombard Renaissance: layer upon layer of reliefs, statues, medallions and inlay in Carrara and Candoglia marble with touches of red porphyry, by Amadeo, Cristoforo Mantegazza, Benedetto Briosco and many others. Work stalled when French troops camped around the monastery in 1519, and the upper part, finished later under Cristoforo Lombardo, swaps sculpture for flatter marble inlay, a change you can read from the forecourt.

Inside, look for the tomb of Ludovico Sforza and Beatrice d'Este, whose effigies by Cristoforo Solari were brought here from Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan; the Visconti founder's own tomb in the opposite transept; Bergognone's frescoes of Gian Galeazzo offering the model of the Certosa to the Virgin; the inlaid choir stalls commissioned by Ludovico il Moro; and, in the old sacristy, a towering late-Gothic triptych in bone and hippopotamus ivory from the Embriachi workshop, carved with dozens of scenes from the story of the Magi and the life of Christ. Beyond the church, the Small Cloister is framed in delicate terracotta ornament, and the Grand Cloister, roughly 125 by 100 metres, is lined with the cells of the monks, each opening onto the central garden.

The monastery's later life was turbulent. Emperor Joseph II expelled the Carthusians in 1782, Napoleon's soldiers stripped the lead from the roof in 1796, and the state declared it a national monument in 1866. Since the 1960s the complex has been home to a Cistercian community.

Getting there

The Certosa stands beside the village of the same name, about 8 km north of Pavia (the nearest city, 7.3 km in a straight line) on the old road towards Milan. The nearest airport is Milano Linate (LIN), about 23 km away. By road it lies just off the route between Milan and Pavia.