Chiesa di Santa Maria Donnaregina Vecchia
Gothic nuns' church holding a fourteenth-century royal tomb and Naples' largest surviving medieval fresco cycle.
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.
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