There’s a hotel in Naples that’s perfect for the night before a flight. In fact, all the United pilots and flight attendants stay there. The hotel is pretty standard and part of a chain, but the building itself is the only “skyscraper” in Naples, which is 24 floors high. As a New Yorker, this is funny to me, but the elevator is a little anxiety-inducing, since Naples is, of course, very prone to earthquakes. But all the rooms have beautiful views, depending on which side of the hotel you’re on: either over the bay of Naples toward elegant Posillipo, or toward the historic center, which I prefer, because it’s a fascinating top-down view of one of the oldest urban grids on earth. You can see Spaccanapoli, the street that cuts a straight line across the old part of town — spaccare means to split, and the splitter is the original decumanus, the main east-west road of the original Greek city. The city is tightly woven, almost impossibly dense, and what catches my eye are the cloisters: enclosed gardens adjacent to churches, tucked right into the urban fabric. The largest cloister I can see from my hotel window is Santa Chiara, attached to one of Naples’ most historic and beloved churches. It’s a Gothic church built when the city was ruled by the French Angevins, and it has both a monastery and a convent, residences for Franciscan monks and nuns called the Poor Clares, separate, of course. There are still monks and nuns in residence, but in a separate, smaller area, separate from the nuns’ cloister garden, which is a major tourist attraction today for its beautiful majolica tile. A cloister is an enclosed garden, which comes from the Latin word claustrum, which you will understand immediately if you suffer from claustrophobia, a fear of enclosed spaces. It’s open to the sky, but enclosed on four sides, with gardens designed for some practicalities but also for spiritual contemplation. Frequently, you will find four paths, which form a giant cross, but are also meant to evoke the four rivers of paradise. Also worth noting, the word paradise is a Persian word which means enclosed garden. It was a place of spiritual meditation and prayer. And as an outdoor space, it had practical functions — you can imagine people doing laundry there, getting some exercise, breathing fresh air. I recognize the cloister not just as a historian, but viscerally, because I spent 16 years working at a museum called The Cloisters, in New York City. The Cloisters is the medieval branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, built from pieces of actual French cloisters, and a full apse from Spain that was deconstructed, shipped across the Atlantic, and reconstructed in upper Manhattan. It’s an entirely secular space, but it feels like a spiritual one. I know what it feels like to spend your days inside one of these places, inside an otherwise busy city. It is beautiful and serene, but also isolating and lonely. But I will say this, even on the loneliest days in late January when maybe only 50 visitors would come to the museum, and the staff was bored and mildly depressed and snipping at each other, and the sky was gray, and the gardens were dead, the space always felt privileged. Who took monastic vows and why For centuries, specifically in the centuries we label as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the cloisters of monasteries and convents were full of monks and nuns; today, this is no longer the case. And that’s not necessarily due to a spiritual crisis because most people did not end up in a monastery by calling. Your family put you there, and they had very specific reasons for doing so. For sons: the eldest inherited the family fortune. Younger sons could work in the family business if there was one, or go into the military or the church. But deliberately placing a son in a monastery could be an act of piety, though it was often political. If he rose to become an abbot or a bishop, he controlled land and credit networks and could leverage political influence that could directly benefit the family. For daughters, the issue was a dowry. In wealthy Venice, the cost of a dowry for a merchant family quadrupled in the early 16th century. In Rome, dowries climbed steadily over the course of the 1500s, inflation driven by status competition between elite families. In contrast, you could place a daughter in a convent for roughly 20 times less, so for a family with multiple daughters, that was an easy decision. In 16th-century Florence, more than a quarter of women from elite families entered religious institutions. In Venice, some estimates go as high as 60%. There were metaphysical motivations as well, primarily the issue of purgatory — this temporary state of purification and suffering for souls that aren’t hellbound, but also don’t have the GPA to go straight to heaven. The prayers of the living, especially monastics, people devoted full time to God, without any distractions or opportunities to sin, which would dilute their spiritual intensity, could shorten that time for family in heaven’s waiting room. The more Masses said for the soul existing in purgatory, the more prayers, the more beautiful art and music that the family patronized for the glorification of God, the better. And the family members who lived in the monasteries and convents were like a stock, compounding spiritual interest over a lifetime. But families didn’t just park their children in a cell and forget about them. They financially supported the community in which they lived and sometimes even funded private apartments. Those from lesser means did physical labor, while the wealthier ones held power. The convent was one of the few places where women could hold power in an official capacity. On the walls of Goleto Abbey, a gorgeous ruin in the countryside near Avellino, there is a fresco of a nun named Scolastica who holds a bishop’s staff, signifying she held that level of status. Goleto Abbey, by the way, is beautiful even if it was almost completely destroyed. It no longer has a roof, but it’s like walking around inside a Gothic skeleton, in the middle of a lush meadow, surrounded by rolling mountains where vineyards produce Aglianico, Falanghina, and Greco di Tufo. But I am digressing from my point that monasteries and convents are where you find the most beautiful art, architecture, and music, and are an enormous part of Italian culture; in one way or another, you will encounter them on your trip to Italy. Moreover, much of the art in famous museums like the Uffizi was originally made for churches and later displaced. I think that if you’re not already an art lover, viewing art in museums is challenging because you’re totally lacking the context for which the artwork was intended. To understand why those artworks got displaced — and also why so many 5-star hotels in Italy were once convents or monasteries — you have to understand one of the most dramatic cultural ruptures in Italian history. A Hinge Point in Italian History When Napoleon Bonaparte crossed the Alps into northern Italy in 1796, he did so with the idea that the Church was an instrument of oppression, that its hoarded wealth belonged to the people, and that the monastic life was a waste of time. In Bologna, Venice, Milan, and Rome, he ordered the suppression of religious orders, and monks and nuns were expelled from their houses so the properties could be seized by the state. It’s also important to remember this was about 65 years before the nation of Italy that we know today was formed, so he was invading a series of kingdoms and papal states, where the church held enormous power. In Bologna alone, which had a population of about 70,000, there were 70 convents and monasteries. Napoleon’s law gave them six months’ notice: any monastery with fewer than fifteen local members was dissolved immediately. The rest were consolidated, taxed, and stripped. And the artwork was being evicted and stolen simultaneously. Tommaso Puccini, an official of the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace, secretly loaded 75 crates of Florence’s most precious artworks and dispatched them to Sicily on a British frigate, just to keep them out of Napoleon’s hands. I write pieces like this so you can travel through a story. If you find my work valuable, please consider supporting it with a paid subscription. He didn’t save everything. Napoleon’s commissars moved systematically through Italy’s churches, convents, and palaces, pulling paintings off walls and loading them onto wagons headed for Paris. A significant part of the Louvre was built on this confiscation. If you’ve visited the Louvre and been surprised by the endless galleries of Italian Renaissance masterpieces, they are there in large part because Napoleon took them. The masterpieces that didn’t go to Paris were concentrated into newly created civic museums in Italian cities. The most significant was the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, called by Napoleon the “Italian Louvre,” and it was filled almost entirely with paintings stripped from churches and convents across northern Italy and Venice in particular. The word pinacoteca means painting gallery. The Brera doesn’t have the splendor of the Louvre, and it’s not on the tourist radar in the same way as the Uffizi, but if you’re visiting Milan, it’s an incredible museum and a better investment of your time than visiting Leonardo’s Last Supper. Also, the reason it’s so hard to get tickets to see the Last Supper is that it’s in its original place — a convent, where the scene was painted on the wall of the dining room where the nuns ate. Leonardo used oil paint on a dry plaster wall rather than the traditional fresco technique, and the wall opposite the dining room was the kitchen. When the kitchen heated up, the paint began to deteriorate, and the Last Supper has been pretty much a disaster ever since. It’s been repainted many times, and if Leonardo hadn
