Santa Chiara Monastery

Santa Chiara tickets: free entry to the basilica, a ticket for the cloister

At Santa Chiara the basilica and the cloister are separate visits. Entry to the basilica is free, in the morning and again in the evening. The cloister, with the museum and the Roman baths, has a ticket of its own, sold only at the ticket office at Via Santa Chiara 49c, with no time slot.

The basilica is the quick stop; the cloister is the reason to pay, since it’s the only one of the convent’s four you can enter. Allow about 40 minutes; the last entry is half an hour before closing. Santa Chiara only provides guides for groups of 25 or more, booked 10 days ahead, but anyone can use the free audio guide by QR code.

To see it with a guide, the walk we sell, at €48.50, starts in the Santa Chiara cloister and ends two and a half hours later in the Sansevero Chapel, in front of the Veiled Christ, with the old town in between. The chapel entry is included, and so is the cloister if you pick the “with Chiostro” option. The group is capped at 30 and you can cancel up to 24 hours before. When you book, check that your date has an English guide.

If you understand Italian, the 35-minute guided visit of the cloister, entry included, costs €25, with a lower price for children aged 4 to 11.

Santa Chiara isn’t on any of the Naples Pass and Naples city passes we sell, nor on the Campania Artecard.

When the Santa Chiara cloister and basilica are open

Morning is the easy time to see both, since the basilica shuts from 12:45 to 16:30.

The majolica cloister of Santa Chiara

In the 18th century Domenico Antonio Vaccaro, at the wish of Queen Maria Amalia of Saxony, wife of Charles of Bourbon, king of Naples, remade the centre of the cloister as a Baroque garden. Its 64 pillars carry garlands of leaves, flowers and fruit, and the majolica benches between them show country scenes, seascapes and myths.

The brothers Donato and Giuseppe Massa made the tiles, and their yellows, oranges and blues answer the orange grove and the vine on the pergola. Only one bench shows life in the convent itself, with a Poor Clare giving the cats their dinner.

The museum, the Roman baths and the nativity scene

The museum opened in 1995 with what was saved from the bombing of 1943. The Hall of Marbles has carved reliefs and coats of arms, and the History room shows pictures of the church before and after the bombing, with busts of its founders, King Robert and Queen Sancha. By the entrance stands an 18th-century nativity scene with shepherds from the 18th and 19th centuries, and a video room shows a 15-minute film on the monastery before and after the war. From 30 October 2026 to 30 June 2027 the museum also shows an exhibition, Tutto serafico in ardore: five 17th- and 18th-century paintings from storage, one of them attributed to the Baroque painter Guercino, and six old books.

The same ticket opens the archaeological area, the remains of Roman baths of the 1st century AD found during the restorations of the 1950s, with a laconicum, the dry sauna of a Roman bath house. Santa Chiara calls them the most complete trace of the baths of Neapolis, the ancient city under Naples.

The basilica of Santa Chiara, Gothic again since 1953

Robert of Anjou, king of Naples, and his wife, Sancha of Majorca, built Santa Chiara between 1313 and 1340 as a double convent, for Poor Clare nuns and for friars. Robert is buried behind the high altar, in a tomb carved in 1343 by the Florentine sculptors Pacio and Giovanni Bertini. At 82 metres long, with no apse, it’s the largest church ever built for the Poor Clares.

What you walk into is a rebuilding. Vaccaro and others had dressed the interior in Baroque between 1742 and 1762, and all of it was lost in the fire that followed the Allied bombing of 1943. The restoration, finished in 1953, took the church back to its Gothic shape, a choice that was disputed at the time.

How to reach Santa Chiara from the metro

Line 1 stops at Università and Dante, both a walk from Via Santa Chiara 49c, just behind Piazza del Gesù, and buses 151 and R2 and trolleybus 202 stop nearby. The Sansevero Chapel is a few minutes away on foot, so the two fit in the same morning.