Church of San Giovanni a Carbonara: what to see and tips

The church of San Giovanni a Carbonara stands in the historic center of Naples, in the San Lorenzo district. Founded in the fourteenth century, it has interiors that are almost all sixteenth-century: for sculpture and painting it is one of the most important Renaissance churches in the city.

You enter by the double-ramp staircase in piperno stone designed by Ferdinando Sanfelice around 1707. It was meant to give the church and the neighboring chapels a single entrance, and today it is already a small Baroque stage set.

The interior has a single nave, with a wooden-beam ceiling. At the far end of the apse the funerary monument to King Ladislaus, 18 meters high, dominates: an enormous late Gothic marble machine, the work of Andrea da Firenze and other Tuscan sculptors.

Passing beneath the monument you enter the Caracciolo del Sole Chapel, Tuscan in taste, with fifteenth-century frescoes on the walls and, facing the entrance, the great tomb of Sergianni Caracciolo.

To the left of the altar is the Caracciolo di Vico Chapel, from the early sixteenth century. Its tombs and sculptures are by different masters of the Neapolitan and Spanish Renaissance, such as Giovanni da Nola, Diego de Siloé and Bartolomé Ordóñez.

On the right wall of the apse is the Crucifixion painted by Giorgio Vasari in 1545. Near the entrance, the Somma Chapel has an altar with the Assumption and a fresco cycle on the Passion of Christ.

The Augustinian convent was founded in 1339 on land donated by a patrician, Gualtiero Galeota. In the Middle Ages those plots were used to dump burned refuse, which watercourses then carried to the sea.

King Ladislaus wanted to be buried here. After his death his sister Joanna II had the mausoleum built, and the convent became a meeting place for men of letters such as Pontano and Sannazaro.

Sergianni Caracciolo was the queen's lover and the real master of the kingdom. On the night of August 18, 1432, after his son's wedding at Castel Capuano, twenty stab wounds killed him: the queen had wanted it, and she buried him here.

In the Recco Chapel there once stood the fifteenth-century nativity scene commissioned in 1478 from Pietro and Giovanni Alamanno. Of its shepherd figures, forty-five remain, now in the Museo nazionale di San Martino.