The majolica cloister of Santa Chiara is one of the most photographed sights in Naples: a garden of pillars and benches faced with yellow and green tiles, painted by hand with lemons, vine tendrils and country scenes, in the middle of a monastery the Angevins founded in the fourteenth century.
Almost everyone thinks it is medieval, like the church next to it, and they are wrong twice over: the majolica is four hundred years younger than the monastery, and the Gothic basilica you will see as you walk in was rebuilt after the war. The same ticket also opens a frescoed walkway, a museum and a Roman archaeological area under the floor; the basilica is visited separately and is free.
Two practical points. The good one is that Santa Chiara has no weekly closing day, and along with underground Naples and the Pio Monte della Misericordia it is one of the visits that save a Wednesday. The other is that tickets are sold only at the ticket office: there is no online sale, so arrive with some time to spare.
But who was such a cheerful garden built for, inside an enclosed monastery?
The majolica cloister is eighteenth century, and it was not made for you
The monastery is fourteenth century, founded by Robert of Anjou and his wife Sancia of Majorca for the Poor Clares. But the majolica everyone photographs is four hundred years younger: the cloister was transformed between 1739 and 1742 by Domenico Antonio Vaccaro, who built an eighteenth-century garden inside the Gothic square.
Vaccaro cut the space with two intersecting paths, making four sectors, and along the paths he raised sixty-four octagonal pillars faced with riggiole, majolica tiles. Between one pillar and the next run benches with painted backs. This is the layout of a villa, not of a convent.
That garden, though, was not public and did not even belong to the monastery as a whole. It was the private garden of the enclosed Poor Clares, women who had renounced the world and who walked here between columns painted with vine tendrils, grapes, lemons and flowers. The finest thing in Santa Chiara was built to be seen by a few dozen people who could not go out.
What to look for on the benches, because it is not what you expect
Look at the backrests, one by one, and not at the columns. On the tiles there are no saints and no biblical episodes: there are landscapes, country scenes, seascapes with boats, hunts, banquets and mythological subjects. Everyday life and mythology inside an enclosed monastery.
Nuns who had left the world had painted around them, in glazed ceramic and in the brightest colours, exactly the world they had left: the sea, the grape harvest, the festivals. We do not know what effect it had, and no source tells us, but it is the sharpest contradiction in the complex and it sits within reach on every bench.
The dominant colours are the yellow of the lemons and the green of the vine leaves on a pale ground, and they come from the ceramic tradition of Campania. Riggiole were not a noble material: they were the common floor covering of Neapolitan houses, brought here to a scale nobody had attempted.
The frescoed walkway, which almost everyone crosses looking elsewhere
Around the garden runs the walkway of the fourteenth-century cloister, with its ribbed Gothic vaults. The walls are covered with seventeenth-century frescoes of stories of saints and of the Franciscan order, and below them runs a band of feigned marbles and cartouches.
Why do you walk past them without seeing them? Because the garden is on the other side and so is all the light. But this is the oldest part of the complex still standing, and it is also what tells you the true scale of a monastery that housed a number of religious women that seems unthinkable today.
The basilica burned on 4 August 1943, and what you see today is a choice
Why does a fourteenth-century Gothic church look new? Because in large part it is, and the date is precise.
On 4 August 1943 an Allied bombing raid struck Santa Chiara. The greater damage was not done by the collapse but by the fire, which lasted almost two days. All the eighteenth-century frescoes burned and most of the Giotto cycle that had decorated the church since its construction was lost. That same day, a few hundred metres away, a bomb was destroying the painted vault of the Court Theatre at the Royal Palace: it is the same raid.
When the church was rebuilt, from the post-war years until 1953, a decision was taken that is still argued over: to return the basilica to its fourteenth-century Gothic form and not to remake the eighteenth-century Baroque that the fire had erased. The result is the single, very tall, bare nave, with its exposed timber roof trusses and its walls of naked stone, which is what you see the moment you go in.
Those who defend the decision say the original building was given back. Those who criticise it call it a historical forgery, because the Baroque of Santa Chiara was history too, it had lasted two centuries and it was destroyed by a bomb, not by an aesthetic judgement. Go in knowing this: what you feel as «Gothic purity» is an interpretation from 1953, not a survival.
At the far end, behind the high altar, stands the funeral monument of Robert of Anjou. It survived the fire almost as it was, and in the restoration it was left in that state: it stands there partly as a memory of what happened.
What is left of Giotto, and where to look
Two opposite versions circulate about Giotto, and both are wrong. It is not true that you can see Giotto at Santa Chiara, and it is not true either that nothing of Giotto is left.
The cycle Giotto painted in Naples in the 1330s is almost entirely lost, and fragments of it survive. Do not look for them in the nave: they are in the Choir of the Poor Clares, the space reserved for the nuns, which is part of the route. They are scraps, not readable scenes. If you arrive expecting the Scrovegni Chapel you will be disappointed; if you arrive knowing you are looking at the little the fire spared, it is a different experience.
The Roman baths under the monastery
The archaeological area is the surprise of the ticket. Beneath and beside the complex lie the remains of a Roman bath building, with its heated rooms and its conduits.
It is the same buried city you walk through twenty metres lower down at underground Naples, and the proof that this block was already built up and served by running water more than a thousand years before the Poor Clares arrived. The museum route also includes an eighteenth-century nativity scene and a section on the history of the complex.
Practical information
Details checked on 9 September 2026. Prices and opening times change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. The full ticket costs 7 euros and covers the majolica cloister, the Museo dell’Opera, the archaeological area and the nativity scene. The reduced ticket costs 5 euros and applies to teachers, university students and over-65s with identification. There is a 4 euro rate for children between 6 and 17 and for FAI members. The basilica is free to visit and has its own entrance from the square.
Warning: tickets are sold only at the ticket office. There is no online sale and no booking, so do not go looking for a skip-the-line: it does not exist, and anyone selling you one is selling you something else.
Opening times. The complex opens Monday to Saturday 9:30-17:00 and on Sunday 10:00-14:00. The ticket office closes thirty minutes earlier. There is no weekly closing day.
Getting there. The entrance to the museum complex is at via Santa Chiara 49c, beside piazza del Gesù Nuovo. From metro line 1 get off at Dante and walk five minutes along via Benedetto Croce, which is the lower decumanus, the one Neapolitans call Spaccanapoli.
How long it takes. An hour for the cloister and the museum. An hour and a half if you add the basilica and a proper stop at the painted benches.
The rest of Naples
Santa Chiara sits on the lower decumanus, and within three hundred metres you have the Sansevero Chapel with the Veiled Christ, the entrance to underground Naples and, climbing back up, the cathedral with the treasure of San Gennaro and the Caravaggio of the Pio Monte della Misericordia. The order in which to take them, with the closing days, is in what to see in Naples in 2 days.
The other place where eighteenth-century Naples is at its finest is the Certosa di San Martino, which also holds one of the city’s most celebrated nativity scenes. The Angevins who founded Santa Chiara also built Castel Nuovo, a quarter of an hour’s walk towards the sea.
Photo credits: majolica cloister by Sailko (CC BY 3.0); frescoed walkway by MentNFG (CC BY-SA 4.0); nave of the basilica by Miguel Hermoso Cuesta (CC BY-SA 3.0). All from Wikimedia Commons.
