A Visit to Certosa: Pisa Charterhouse and the Natural History Museum of the University of Pisa
It is the fourth summer in a row that I visit Pisa, Italy, together with my Italian partner. You can read about those travels in the previous posts. This one, for example, tells you about my very favorite place in Tuscany. This summer, we’re lucky enough to stay in Tuscany for more than a month. That means plenty of time to visit all the places we always wanted to see but somehow never managed to get to. One of them is a visit to Certosa, a former monastery including the Pisa Charterhouse or Certosa di Calci and the Natural History Museum of the University of Pisa.
Pisa Charterhouse
This former Carthusian monastery is located in the comune of Calci, 10 kilometers outside of Pisa and in the middle of beautiful Tuscan countryside. In Italian, the Charterhouse is called Certosa di Calci or Certosa di Pisa a Calci. “Certosa” is Italian for Carthusian monastery, deriving from the Charteuse Mountains in France where the order’s main monastery is located.
The Carthusians founded the monastery in 1366 in Val Graziosa, a plain that the mountains (Monti Pisani) are overlooking. Pope Gregory XI expelled the monks from Gorgona Abbey, a Benedictine monastery located on the island of Gorgona. He gave the island and the estate to the Val Graziosa Carthusians. The Mediterranean area reached a peak of political instability in the year 1425, and the peace of the monks on the island could no longer be maintained. They abandoned the monastery and took up residence in Calci. The monastery you see today has been mainly restructured to accommodate monks fleeing from France following the dramatic new laws that were closing down monasteries.
During its long history, the monastery has been restructured many times. It received its current Baroque appearance during the expansions of the 17th and 18th centuries. In the year 1972, the last remaining monks left the monastery and it became a museum. The Western part of the complex was given to the University of Pisa that started there the Museum of Natural History in 1981.
Thus, today, the former monastery serves as the location for two different museums: il Museo Nazionale della Certosa Monumentale di Calci (the Pisa or Calci Charterhouse) and il Museo di Storia Naturale dell’ Università di Pisa (the Natural History Museum of the University of Pisa). These two museums are completely different entities located in different parts of the monastery complex. You will need two different tickets to enter the. A visit to Certosa can start from either, in this post we start it from the Charterhouse.
At the time of our visit, it was not possible to enter the Charterhouse without a guide. Many areas of the charterhouse are not open to public even when entering with a guide, possibly due to their deteriorating state. So, we booked a guided tour and entered the property. First we were greeted by the 17th century façade of the church, made of white marble, topped with the tower figure of Mother Mary.
The tour took us through several beautiful chapels and the “foresteria”, which was reserved for the frequent visits of the Grand Duke. The tour also gave a glimpse to one of the rooms of the monks – a simple space with a bed, a praying table, and some religious pictures on the walls. The chapels and main church of the monastery are, however, far from simple in all their breathtaking beauty.
One of the best parts of a visit to Certosa is just seeing the vast green yard of the monastery. The visitor gets to see how small and humble the cemetery of the monks was. They were buried without a casket and didn’t get a tombstone, only an unassuming cross. The last stop of the tour was the old pharmacy, closed at the time of our visit. It used to be one of the main sources of income for the monks and was actually functioning until some few years ago.
I wish we had had more time just to walk around outside, imagining how it must have been to live here when no trees grew on the property. The only thing you would hear in this community of silence would have been the water flowing in the fountain, something considered a holy and sacred sound.
At one time, there were only 15 monks inhabiting the Certosa. The monks lived here a solitary life of prayer, contemplation, and work, such as writing or cultivating the garden. Since the monks had made a vow of silence, a table on the wall as seen in the picture below was used to organize the daily life of the monastery.
A family priest of ours told us that among the monks, there was always one whose task it was to go into the world outside the monastery every Monday to take care of some earthly duties. For this monk, it often became too difficult to navigate the dichotomy of having the chance to speak and interact with people for some hours one day a week and then committing to complete silence for the six remaining days. They often ended up leaving the monastery. Based on Internet sources though it seems that it was more the 65 or so “lay brothers” living in the monastery on whom such duties of communication fell. They cultivated the food for the monks, cooked, cleaned, and took care of the interactions with the outside world.
I wish I would write an enthusiastic description of all the insights into the monastery life that this guided tour brought to me. However, the main feeling it gave to me and my partner was annoyance. Such an amazing place with long history, and we have a tour guide who didn’t seem to care one bit of the place or for the tourists, so bored was his face when reciting through the few obligatory facts he had memorized. The tour guide’s main interest seemed to be having us run through the few rooms of the monastery that we were allowed to see in record time, constantly rushing us forward and making it impossible to just take a moment to enjoy the surroundings and contemplate on the monastery itself.
The content of the tour was very thin -no stories about monastery life, no inside information, no nothing. The tour was in Italian, but for the sake of some of the non-Italian tourists (me a Finn, a couple of French visitors), he tried to squeeze in some poor English every here and there. Let me just say that if Tuscany would take both tourism and its enormous cultural heritage seriously, they would make these tours also in English. At least they would make sure the tours are delivered by people who do not look like they would rather be anywhere else than escorting a group of tourists.
The Natural History Museum of the University of Pisa
As mentioned previously, the other part of a visit to Certosa consists of a museum of natural history hosted by the University of Pisa. The museum is located in the more humble parts of the monastery dedicated to everyday chores more than to religious service and pray.
The collections of the museum have a 500 years long history. The museum dates back to the 16th century, when Ferdinando I de ‘Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany started a cabinet of curiosities in the Giardino dei Semplici. The Grand Duke ended up opening one of the first museums of the world, partially fashioned after the German idea of “Wunderkammer” and consisting of an expanding collection of minerals, animals, skeletons, and fossils. The museum expanded especially quickly in the 19th century under the direction of Paolo Savi. The collections grew, the exhibition spaces were enlarged, and hundreds of scientific writings were published. In the current exhibitions (summer 2023), the visitor can sit at what is modelled to be like Savi’s studio and imagine how it was to be the director of the museum in his time.
Currently, the museum comprises 400 years of research at the University of Pisa combined with the Grand Duke’s initial collections. The massive scientifically and historically important collections consist of findings from zoology, paleontology, and mineralogy. here is also an aquarium with the largest warm water section in the whole of Italy. The museum houses one of the most expansive collections of cetacean skeletons in the whole Europe. The collections have also other specialties worth mentioning, such as a lovely collection of 51 marine invertebrates made of glass by the artists Rudolf and Leopold Blaschka. In addition, the museum’s oldest collections include seashells accumulated by the Italian scientist Niccolò Gualtieri. That being said, most of the museum is dedicated to taxidermy animals. If looking at vitrine after vitrine filled with animals that died up to well over 200 years ago staring back at you is not quite your cup of tea, this museum might not be your favorite place.
The museum also has a very nice aquarium, the biggest fresh water one in the whole Italy. If the tiny axolotl in the middle picture doesn’t make you smile, I don’t know what will!
The museum has various sections ranging from a mineral gallery to the evolution of birds and from the prehistory of Monte Pisano to temporary exhibitions. I would not recommend caretakers of small children to pay a visit to this museum to see the dinosaur exhibition as the main target -it would probably be a disappointment for modern kids expecting a Tyrannosaurus Rex roaring as a natural size, realistically moving robot. In the picture below, you can see a model of a Velociraptor’s nest.
A Visit to Certosa: Summing up
While we had a nice time looking around the massive natural history museum during this visit to Certosa, my criticism of it resembles that I gave earlier about the Charterhouse. I (and my partner as well) got the feeling that Italians do not fully understand the value of their treasures and lack either the motivation or the skill (or maybe both) to display them in a way that would make a museum of international quality, fascinating for tourists all over the world.
What I saw now was an overwhelming amount of things from stuffed animals to mineral samples thrown into old rooms that stank strangely and partially seemed like they had been cleaned last some time in the 1980’s. Some of the display cabinets were embarrassingly dirty. There was plenty of information available in English, but the problem is that this information is not displayed in a way that makes sense pedagogically. The collections could be organized way better, and more attention could be paid onto how to help the visitor gain information. Nobody wants to read 1980’s style written plaques that go on forever and ever. At one part of the museum, we saw interactive screens and instantly became happy that at least some jumps towards digitalization had been taken. Alas, the screens either did not work or gave you a middle-school level PowerPoint style presentation. Some of these disappointments are balanced out by the awesome views. For sure, there are not many museums in the world that can compete with the beautiful surroundings of this one.
What we saw during a visit to Certosa was in a paradoxical contrast with how museums and other touristic experiences are packaged in our current place of residence, the Netherlands. The cultural treasures of the Netherlands are microscopic compared to those of Italy, but the Dutch handle the art of storytelling and marketing. With one tenth of the stuff on display in the Museum of Natural History, they would have built a clean, curated, engaging display accessible also for people who don’t speak Italian. A Dutch version of he tour guide of Certosa would speak English and at least pretend to be interested in the place they are showing. A visit to Certosa has all the chances of leaving the tourist breathless at the amount of cultural and historical richness they have just witnessed. Right now this doesn’t happen to as great a degree as it could.
