On via Toledo, inside the building that was once the headquarters of the Banco di Napoli, hangs Caravaggio’s last documented painting: the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, delivered in May 1610, barely a month before the painter died on the beach at Porto Ercole. You can see it for eight euros, at the Gallerie d’Italia, and since 1 August 2025 in a completely new room, with new lighting.
There are two things to know before you go. Gallerie d’Italia closes on Mondays, the only day of the week you can’t get in. And this canvas travels: it’s been to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the National Gallery in London, and in 2025 to Rome, at the Gallerie Nazionali Barberini Corsini. It’s back and on display now, but if the painting is the reason for your trip, call the toll free number before booking your train ticket: loans aren’t announced to people planning a day out.
And do you know how a varnish that wouldn’t dry gave Caravaggio back his last painting?
What you see: five figures and a moment after
Look at the canvas before you read the subject, because the scene is built to be understood late. There are five figures against a dark background, lit from the left, in a space that resists measurement. Nobody is running, nobody is shouting. It looks as if little is happening.
Then you see the arrow. It has already entered Ursula’s chest, and the painting isn’t the moment of the martyrdom: it’s the instant after. Caravaggio bypassed the scene of action and painted the split second in which everyone, including the man who shot the arrow, realises what has just been done.
Ursula is shown in profile, and the pallor of her face stands out against the red of her cloak. To the left is the King of the Huns, who killed her: legend has it he asked her to marry him and that she refused. Caravaggio gives him a savage grimace, with features almost distorted, making him the ugliest thing in the painting.
And then there’s a man behind, his face turned upward and his mouth open, watching helplessly. It’s Caravaggio himself, his last self-portrait. A painter who paints himself among the powerless witnesses of a killing, a month before dying on the run: the canvas is also a document about the man who made it.
The measurements are 143 by 180 centimetres, oil on canvas: smaller than you’d expect if you have the great Neapolitan altarpieces in mind.
The painting belonged to Mattia Preti, until 1980
How does the last work of Caravaggio lose its attribution? It doesn’t lose one: there wasn’t one to begin with. For most of its history this canvas was considered a work by Mattia Preti, a Calabrian painter of two generations later, and the attribution to Caravaggio only came in 1980, when correspondence about the picture surfaced in the archives of the Doria family.
The painting was commissioned in 1610 by the Genoese prince Marcantonio Doria, and the choice of subject has a family reason: Doria was tied to Livia Grimaldi, who had taken vows in Naples under the name of Sister Ursula. The patron was commissioning the martyrdom of the saint whose name his relative had taken.
The document that settled the matter is a letter from May 1610 written by Lanfranco Massa, the Doria family’s agent in Naples, to the prince in Genoa. Massa describes a practical mishap: he had put the painting out in the sun to dry the varnish, and the varnish had thickened instead of setting. He wanted to hear back from the painter on how to fix it without ruining the work.
Caravaggio’s final masterpiece was traced back to him thanks to an administrative note about a botched varnish job, written by a clerk worried about the shipment. The exact dates of the correspondence are reported differently by different sources, so none is given here: what is certain is the month, May 1610, and the archive where the file was found.
The cleaning that brought back three figures
Before the 2025 rehang, the canvas underwent a thorough cleaning, carried out by restorers Laura Cibrario and Fabiola Jatta in the museum’s in house laboratory, without the painting ever leaving the building.
Which is why you see it better today than ten years ago: the cleaning brought back into view three figures that layers over the paint had erased over time. A painting with five figures, three of which had become invisible, was, in effect, a different painting.
Today the canvas sits inside a climate controlled frame, keeping temperature and humidity under control. It’s a museum detail rather than an art historical one, but it shows how little room for error there is: this is the only work that documents the final month of Caravaggio’s working life.
How you reach the painting, since 1 August 2025
The rehang didn’t just touch the room. The climb to the first floor is now accompanied by a work made for that exact space, La Nuvola e l’ombra by Jacopo Foggini: red polycarbonate clouds generating a violet light, which you walk through before reaching the canvas.
The choice is deliberately preparatory: the installation’s colours echo those of the painting, and the route puts you in a particular state of light before you stand in front of the Caravaggio. You can call it a nice idea or one flourish too many, but the way you look at that canvas changes depending on what’s in your eyes thirty seconds earlier, and the museum understood that.
The rest of the museum, which isn’t a footnote
Many people come here for the Caravaggio and leave after twenty minutes, missing the reason the ticket costs eight euros instead of four.
The building is Palazzo Piacentini, the monumental former headquarters of the Banco di Napoli designed by architect Marcello Piacentini: ten thousand square metres, converted into a museum under a project by Michele De Lucchi with AMDL Circle and opened to the public in 2022. The exhibition space is spread across five floors and organised into three thematic routes.
On the first floor, alongside the Caravaggio, are works by Artemisia Gentileschi and Luca Giordano, the view painting of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries with Gaspar van Wittel, Anton Smink Pitloo and Giacinto Gigante of the so called Posillipo School, the open air naturalism of the Resina School, Domenico Morelli, and a collection of drawings and sculptures by Vincenzo Gemito.
On the second floor is the real surprise, and it isn’t Neapolitan: the Caputi collection of Greek and Magna Graecia ceramics, more than five hundred vases dated between the fifth and third centuries BC, made in Athens, Puglia and Lucania. They all come from Ruvo di Puglia, which in antiquity was a ceramic production centre famous across the Mediterranean. If you’ve happened to visit Ruvo di Puglia cathedral, these vases are the other half of that city.
Practical information
Data checked on 10 September 2026 on the museum’s official page. Prices and hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Full price is 8 euros and covers the entire permanent collection across the five floors. The reduced price is 4 euros. Admission is free for over 65s, under 26s, school groups and customers of the Intesa Sanpaolo group, which owns the museum. The first Sunday of every month admission is free, with no conditions.
Watch out for an outdated price still doing the rounds. Several write ups give full price as seven euros and list over 65s among the reduced categories at four. Those numbers are outdated: full price is eight and over 65s don’t pay.
Hours. The museum opens Tuesday to Friday 10:00-19:00 and Saturday and Sunday 10:00-20:00. Closed on Mondays.
Getting there. The address is via Toledo 177. By metro line 1, get off at Toledo or Municipio; by the Centrale funicular, at Augusteo. The Toledo stop is one of the art stations, so you walk through an artwork before reaching the museum.
Contacts. The toll free number is 800 167619 and the email is napoli@gallerieditalia.com. For accessibility information there’s napoliaccessibile@gallerieditalia.com. Call ahead if you’re coming for the Caravaggio, for the reason given above.
Watch out for a wrong name on third party tickets. Some resellers still sell entry citing Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano: that was the previous location, and the museum has since moved. The right address is via Toledo 177.
How much time it takes. Half an hour if you’re here just for the Caravaggio. An hour and a half for the first and second floors, which is the visit I’d recommend.
The rest of Naples
Naples has three Caravaggios, not two. The first is the Seven Works of Mercy at the Pio Monte della Misericordia, still on the altar it was painted for. The third is the Flagellation of Christ at the Capodimonte Museum, painted in 1607 for a family chapel in San Domenico Maggiore and moved to the museum in 1972. If you’ve come to the city for him, the programme is three stops, and the painter’s life, with his works scattered across Italy, is told in Caravaggio’s paintings.
The museum faces via Toledo, so the monumental centre is right nearby: the Royal Palace with its historical apartment, Castel Nuovo and the entrance to the Bourbon Tunnel at vico del Grottone. Underfoot are the art stations of the metro.
For the painter you see here with just one work, who lived and worked in Naples for years, there’s Artemisia Gentileschi. The two days with each stop’s closing times are laid out in what to see in Naples in 2 days.
Photo credits: the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula by Caravaggio is in the public domain; the facade of the Banco di Napoli building is by Elliott Brown (CC BY 2.0). Both via Wikimedia Commons.
