The Certosa di San Lorenzo is the largest monastic complex in Southern Italy as well as one of the most interesting in Europe for its architectural magnificence and abundance of artistic treasures. The construction work began in 1306 by the will of Tommaso Sanseverino, count of Marsico and lord of the Vallo di Diano, and continued, with extensions and renovations, until the nineteenth century. The gilding of the stuccoes of the church, the work of the lay brother Francesco Cataldi, are of the seventeenth century. The frescoes and the transformations of use of existing environments are instead of the eighteenth century. The original sixteenth-century dress, made of local stone and rigidly marked by the Doric order of the coupled columns, was enriched in the Baroque period with statues and pinnacles. The cloister of the Foresteria, late Mannerist, is composed of a portico with a fountain in the center and a loggia from which the clock tower rises. The loggia is decorated with seventeenth-century paintings. The Church, with a single nave with five chapels on the right side, is divided into two areas by a wall. There are also two choirs. The main altar, in scagliola and mother-of-pearl, is attributed to GD Vinaccia (c. 17th century). The Church is decorated with eighteenth-century gilded stuccoes that overlap a structure that is certainly from the fourteenth century. Next to the series of suggestive side chapels, there are the Chapter Hall, rich in eighteenth-century stuccoes, and the Cappella dei Tesoro, which constituted a sort of safe where the very rich furniture of the church was probably kept and protected. In the Cappella del Fondatore, located in a corner of the cloister, you can admire the altar in scagliola. The kitchen, the result of that feverish eighteenth-century activity that significantly distorted the rooms of the monastery, was probably a refurbished refectory. Frescoes slightly obscured by time and kitchen fumes decorate the barrel vault. To admire the stone work tables and the huge hood under which the ancient kettle is placed on the fires usually used. The Library, a vast room that preserves the majolica floor and the ceiling decorations, housed tens of thousands of books, illuminated manuscripts, manuscripts, of which only a very small part remains today in the Certosa, about two thousand volumes. The large cloister, with its almost fifteen thousand square meters of surface, is among the largest in Europe. The large garden of the cloister corresponds to a small extent to the eighteenth-century arrangement, above all due to the interventions carried out during the two world wars for the construction of the shelters for prisoners.