The majolica walk
Columns and benches sheathed in painted tile — the south's most famous courtyard.
IlSistemone — CC BY-SA 3.0 · This Photo was taken by Wolfgang Moroder. Feel free to use my photos, but please mention me as the author and send me a message. This image is not in the public domain. Please respect the copyright pr — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Robertofusco — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Marco Ober — CC BY-SA 4.0
Painted tin-glazed ceramics famous in Naples and Sicily — and when the Clarissans renewed their cloister in 1739 they commissioned Naples's father-son tile masters to sheathe it in cheerfully worldly scenes: vines and country dances — a bold choice for an enclosed order that made the world's most famous ceramic garden.
Not all did: centuries of Baroque melted in a two-day blaze and Giotto's frescoes were lost but for fragments. The great marble tombs stood cracked and were restored — the church today a double lesson: war's loss, and Naples's choice to recover the original rather than the ornament.
Church ten free minutes, cloister a meditative half hour, museum and baths for the curious — then cross to the Gesù Nuovo: a strange diamond façade, a crowded Baroque interior and a saint-doctor's story. The pair fills a satisfying ninety minutes.
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Behind the huge Gothic church of Santa Chiara — the greatest of Angevin Naples and its royal burial place — hides the city's most famous courtyard and most photographed corner: the Clarissan cloister with its majolica walk, where eighteenth-century artists sheathed every column and stone bench in painted tiles — vines, lemons and country scenes in yellow and blue glowing under the southern sun, set in a hushed convent garden that cannot believe roaring Spaccanapoli lies just past its wall. The church itself is a resurrection story: the bombs of 1943 burned it to the bone, and Naples rebuilt it bare Gothic as its Angevin original, the surviving tombs of the Anjou kings within. The complex adds a small museum, Roman baths found beneath the convent, and a grand Neapolitan nativity scene. Church free, cloister ticketed — and the rule of visiting: never leave Spaccanapoli without this hour of stillness.
Columns and benches sheathed in painted tile — the south's most famous courtyard.
The church returned from 1943's fire to Angevin purity.
Naples's French kings in their surviving marble.
Via Santa Chiara 49, 80134 Naples