Pio Monte della Misericordia

This guide to Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples opens with a bank note from January 1607, the final installment of an outrageous four hundred ducats paid to a fugitive painter, Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio. It traces back five years earlier to seven young Neapolitan noblemen who began visiting the incurable ward on Fridays and pooled their own money to found this charity and its church. One of the seven, a friend of poets and connoisseurs, is the man who talked the others into hiring a wanted fugitive for the job.