The visionary or rhapsodic quality of Romanticism was a sacramental consciousness, a capacity to see or sense divinity in the minutiae of finitude.
Eugene McCarraher
If the Via San Gregorio Armeno is Presepio ground zero, then the Certosa di San Martino must surely be, to coin a phrase, ground one. High up on the Vomero, bidding a reluctant adieu to the dazzling eternal vista of Napoli: a tightly woven and intricately patterned cloth unfurled beneath the brooding flanks of Vesuvio, the pilgrim at at last forsakes the famous belvedere and drunkenly plunges into the stone cooled darkness of the museum corridors.
Now begins the descent into the old kitchens of the charterhouse, where from the gloom emerges a remarkable collection of individual pastori figures, larger vignettes encased in ornate illuminated cabinets, and finally the magnificent Cuciniello Presepe, which may quite aptly be described as grand in spite of its miniature scale. Time to linger awhile and let the spirit wander amidst the divine drama rendered so exquisitely in all its minute detail from the most elevated to the most mundane.
