Certosa di San Martino

Certosa di San Martino tickets: which one to buy

The certosa is a state museum with a modest ticket, and it is free on the first Sunday of the month, when it is also crowded. A combined ticket with Castel Sant'Elmo next door costs a little more and is worth it for the ramparts and the view. Audio guides are not available; guided tours with an art historian are sold privately and cost several times the entry, which is money well spent in a building where the church, the cloisters, the museum and the nativity collection all have separate stories.

Getting up the Vomero hill is the practical question: the Montesanto funicular or the Central funicular both climb from the old town in a few minutes for the price of a bus ticket, and taxis charge many times that. Walking up is possible and steep. Tickets are sold at a small office beside the gate, and the free Sunday applies only to the first Sunday of the month.

Visiting Certosa di San Martino: what to see

Carthusians founded the charterhouse in 1325 and it was finished in 1368, then enlarged and rebuilt in the seventeenth century by Cosimo Fanzago into one of the great baroque interiors of Italy. The church is a dense surface of inlaid marble, with paintings by Ribera, Giordano and Caracciolo; the sacristy and the treasury continue it. The Great Cloister, by contrast, is white, calm and enormous, ringed with 64 marble columns, with a small monks' graveyard in one corner marked by carved skulls.

The museum occupies the monastic buildings and covers Naples in objects: royal barges, historic maps, ceramics and above all the presepi, the Neapolitan nativity scenes, of which the Cuciniello crib fills a whole room with hundreds of figures. The terraced gardens below the cloister look straight down onto the bay, Vesuvius and the whole city. The pharmacy and the monks' quarters open off the smaller cloister, and the prior's apartment keeps its own garden and loggia over the bay.

Certosa di San Martino opening hours and the best time to go

Open most days with one weekly closure, from mid-morning to mid-afternoon, and last admission an hour before; the hours are shorter than most Italian museums and catch visitors out. The gardens and some sections close earlier or are shut entirely for staffing reasons. The view from the terraces is best in the late afternoon with the sun behind you, though the museum may close before that.

Naples is hot in summer and the hill catches whatever breeze there is. Photography without flash is allowed. Allow two hours, three to do the museum properly. Castel Sant'Elmo beside it stays open later and its roof gives the same view without the closing time. The Vomero is a residential district with good restaurants and few visitors in the evening, which makes it a pleasant place to end a day.