Pisa Charterhouse

At the foot of the Monte Pisano, among olive groves in a valley the monks called Val Graziosa, the graceful vale, lies one of the grandest monasteries of Tuscany. The Certosa di Calci, also known as the Pisa Charterhouse, opens onto a vast forecourt, with the Baroque church raised at the far end on a podium reached by a double staircase. Behind this ceremonial face stretches a whole silent town of cloisters, chapels, gardens and monks' houses.

The charterhouse was founded in 1366 under Francesco Moricotti, archbishop of Pisa, for the Carthusians, the strictest of the contemplative orders, whose monks lived largely alone in separate cells. In the following century it absorbed the community of the old Benedictine monastery on the island of Gorgona, off the Tuscan coast, and grew in wealth and influence. Its present appearance, though, comes mostly from a sweeping rebuilding in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the church, the great cloister and the guest quarters were given their Baroque dress.

Inside the church, the walls and dome are covered with frescoes by the Bolognese painters Giuseppe and Antonio Rolli and by Stefano Cassiani of Lucca, above inlaid marble and carved wooden choir stalls. The refectory keeps an older treasure, a Last Supper painted by Bernardino Poccetti in 1597, and the apartments reserved for the grand dukes of Tuscany are richly decorated with stucco and allegorical paintings. Around the great cloister, with its octagonal fountain at the centre, open the doors of the monks' cells, each a small house of several rooms with its own garden. The last monks left in 1972.

Since the 1980s the west wing has housed the Natural History Museum of the University of Pisa, whose collections began in the late 16th century as a cabinet of curiosities attached to Pisa's botanical garden. Its long gallery of whale and dolphin skeletons, set in a loggia under the roof with views over the olive groves, is among the most important collections of its kind in Europe.

Getting there

The charterhouse stands in the comune of Calci, about 10 km east of Pisa; the town of Cascina lies about 6 km to the south across the Arno plain. Pisa Centrale is the nearest major railway station, and Pisa International Airport (PSA) is about 11 km away. From Pisa the Certosa is reached by road through the villages at the foot of the Monte Pisano.