Certosa di San Martino

Interesting facts

The pharmacy holds Antonio Corradini's model for the Veiled Christ, the starting point for Giuseppe Sanmartino's famous marble in the Sansevero Chapel.

The museum keeps the Tavola Strozzi, a tempera panel of about 1472–1473 showing Naples from the sea as it looked in the fifteenth century.

The Cuciniello nativity, given by a nineteenth-century Neapolitan playwright, has more than 170 figures, 80 animals, 28 angels and some 400 miniature objects.

Beneath the monastery, Gothic pillars carry pointed vaults more than 15 metres high, now home to about 150 sculptures and inscriptions from the 13th–17th centuries.

The terraced hanging gardens cover about seven hectares and still use water channels laid out in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The monks were expelled and readmitted several times: driven out in 1799 and 1807, back in 1804 and 1836, then removed for good in 1866.

The monks paid Guido Reni 3,000 ducats for his Nativity, more than double the 1,300 ducats they paid Ribera for his Communion of the Apostles.

San Martino was only the second Carthusian house in Campania, founded nineteen years after the charterhouse of San Lorenzo at Padula.

Why it is worth it

On the crest of the Vomero hill, beside Castel Sant'Elmo, the Certosa di San Martino looks down over the whole of Naples and its gulf. Together the castle and the charterhouse form the city's most visible skyline landmark. Behind the plain outer walls lies one of the richest ensembles of Neapolitan Baroque art anywhere, gathered in a Carthusian monastery of about a hundred rooms, two churches, three cloisters and hanging gardens.

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. The Counter-Reformation brought a grand remodelling: Giovanni Antonio Dosio redesigned the complex from 1589, and from 1623 to 1656 Cosimo Fanzago gave it its Baroque dress, including the church facade, the marble inlays of the chapels and the busts over the doors of the great cloister.

The church is the heart of it. Its polychrome marble floor, completed in the 1660s by Bonaventura Presti, plays tricks of depth under your feet; Giovanni Lanfranco painted the Ascension across the vault between 1636 and 1639; and the chapels hold work by Jusepe de Ribera, Massimo Stanzione, Battistello Caracciolo and Guido Reni. In the Treasury chapel Luca Giordano painted the Triumph of Judith on the ceiling around 1704. The great cloister, designed by Dosio and finished by Fanzago, has at one side the monks' little cemetery behind a Baroque balustrade topped with carved skulls. The frescoes in the church porch include scenes of Carthusians being put to death in Henry VIII's England.

The monks were expelled for good in 1866, and the buildings became the National Museum of San Martino, conceived by the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli to tell the story of Naples and the southern kingdoms. It takes in the prior's quarters and old cells, with sections on carriages, naval history and Neapolitan painting, and a celebrated collection of nativity scenes. The loggia at the corner of the prior's apartment gives a sweeping view of the entire gulf.

Getting there

The charterhouse is on the Vomero hill in central Naples, above the Montecalvario quarter. Naples International Airport (NAP) is about 6 km away.

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From the encyclopaedia

The Certosa di San Martino is a former monastery complex, now a museum, in Naples, southern Italy. Along with Castel Sant'Elmo that stands beside it, this is the most visible landmark of the city, perched atop the Vomero hill that commands the gulf. A Carthusian monastery, it was finished and inaugurated under the rule of Joan I of Naples in 1368. It was dedicated to St. Martin of Tours. During the first half of the 16th century it was expanded. Later, in 1623, it was further expanded and became, under the direction of architect Cosimo Fanzago, essentially the structure one sees today.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia