Cloister of San Gregorio Armeno

This guide to the Cloister of San Gregorio Armeno in Naples follows Enrichetta Caracciolo, who arrived as a teenager in 1840 not out of vocation but because her family's finances left no other option after her father's death. For two decades she lived here among daughters of Naples' oldest families, each placed by a father doing the same arithmetic, while the marble dolphin fountain and gilded choir ceiling around you were paid for by an abbess named Beatrice Carafa. Stand in the courtyard her money helped decorate, and consider what that gilding was actually buying.