Piazza San Domenico Maggiore

Look at what is in front of you: it is not a facade but the back of a church. The Gothic apse of San Domenico Maggiore faces the square, while the main entrance is tucked away in a courtyard. Charles II of Anjou had the church built at the end of the 13th century for the Dominicans, the order of preachers.

1A school for Europe

The convent housed the order's theological school, the «studium», and in 1272 Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian, came to teach here; he had been born not far from Naples. Three centuries later, in 1565, a young man from Nola took his vows here: his name was Giordano Bruno, and he would be burned for heresy in Rome in 1600.

2The Aragonese pantheon

When Alfonso the Magnanimous conquered Naples in 1442, the Crown of Aragon chose this church as its burial place. Its sacristy still holds dozens of cloth-covered coffins of kings and nobles of the Aragonese dynasty. It was Alfonso who commissioned the staircase that climbs beside the apse.

The spire that dominates the square was begun as thanks for the end of the plague of 1656, which killed a large part of the population, and was not finished until 1737.

All around stand the palaces of the nobility: the Sangro, the Carafa, the Petrucci. And on one corner, a century-old pastry shop, Scaturchio.

3What to look for

• The San Domenico spire, the first of the city's three great votive spires.
• The battlements of the apse, almost military in feel.
• The 1764 plaque on the church wall, a decree by King Ferdinand IV banning games, street trading and rubbish in the square.