Charterhouse & Museum of San Martino

This guide to the Charterhouse and Museum of San Martino in Naples starts with a contradiction: a monastery built on vows of poverty, sheathed floor to ceiling in marble shipped from Carrara, Belgium, Spain and France. It follows Cosimo Fanzago, the sculptor and architect who took charge of the site in 1623 and spent more than thirty years fitting hundreds of individually cut stone pieces into the swirling patterns across the nave. In the great cloister, his marble balustrade around the monks' private cemetery is topped with carved skulls wearing laurel wreaths, a reminder that even here, death kept the brothers company.