
Charterhouse & Museum of San Martino
Baroque monastery church sheathed floor to ceiling in inlaid marble shipped from four countries.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Complesso Monumentale di Santa Chiara
Gothic monastery cloister of hand-painted majolica tiles, once home to a cloistered order of nuns.
Donnaregina Monumental Complex - Diocesan Museum of Naples
Gothic convent choir holding Naples's largest surviving fourteenth-century fresco cycle.
Chiesa di Santa Maria Donnaregina Vecchia
Gothic nuns' church holding a fourteenth-century royal tomb and Naples' largest surviving medieval fresco cycle.
Monumental complex Purgatory ad Arco
Baroque church of skull-carved facade above, radiant chapels of Neapolitan Baroque painting below.
Cloister of San Gregorio Armeno
Baroque convent courtyard with a dolphin fountain, once home to daughters of Naples' noble families.
Basilica di Santa Maria della Sanità
Baroque church with a majolica-tiled dome, built over ancient catacombs by a friar-architect.