Chiesa di Santa Maria Donnaregina Vecchia
Gothic nuns' church holding a fourteenth-century royal tomb and Naples' largest surviving medieval fresco cycle.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Chiesa di Santa Maria Donnaregina Vecchia in Naples starts at the tomb Tino di Camaino carved for Queen Mary of Hungary after her death in 1323, a monument that shows her twice over, dead and pleading, at her son Robert the Wise's request. It follows Mary's rebuilding of the church after an earthquake, then climbs to the choir loft, where Pietro Cavallini's workshop painted the largest fresco cycle to survive from fourteenth-century Naples between roughly 1307 and 1320. The Poor Clare nuns who commissioned it watched Mass from behind a stone grille, hidden from the public below. Look up at the Last Judgment covering the entrance wall as you enter.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Donnaregina Monumental Complex - Diocesan Museum of Naples
Gothic convent choir holding Naples's largest surviving fourteenth-century fresco cycle.
Complesso Monumentale di Santa Chiara
Gothic monastery cloister of hand-painted majolica tiles, once home to a cloistered order of nuns.
San Giovanni a Carbonara
Gothic church holding the tomb of a royal favorite stabbed to death by knights of his own queen.
Monumental Complex of Saint Anne of the Lombards
Renaissance chapel holding a life-size terracotta Lamentation, its mourners modeled on real Aragonese courtiers.
Charterhouse & Museum of San Martino
Baroque monastery church sheathed floor to ceiling in inlaid marble shipped from four countries.
Church of San Domenico Maggiore
Gothic Dominican basilica where a teenage novice who imagined an infinite universe once took his vows.