The church of Santa Chiara, one of the most interesting medieval buildings in Naples, was built on the orders of the sovereigns Robert and Sancia of Anjou, who entrusted its construction to the architect Gagliardo Primario in 1328, from then on it was destined to receive Neapolitan royalty and nobility. The building in lovely Provençal Gothic style, was linked with a Poor Clare's convent in homage to the Queen's repressed vocation for the secluded life. During the eighteenth century, the interior was completely transformed, dressing the original Gothic structure with precious ornamentation, that made it one of the most beautiful and sumptuous of the Italian Baroque. The magnificent eighteenth-century adornment was, however, completely lost during the Second World War, and what remained was eliminated in subsequent restoration, that returned to the previous Gothic structure. The elegant and austere facade, with its pronaos of three pointed arches, flanked on the left by a majestic bell tower still preserving its fourteenth-century structure in its lower part, has a beautiful marble portal, surmounted by a precious and large rose window. The interior, with a single nave and ten chapels on each side, is very sober and contains works dating back, for the most part, to fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Passing through the sacristy and two small passages, the Clare's choir is reached, considered to be one of the best examples of Neapolitan Gothic. The marble portal is superb, from the fourteenth century: now without decoration owing to wartime damage, there is a tombstone for the sepulchre of Robert of Anjou and fragments of a lamentation for the dead Christ, a cycle frescoed by Giotto and disciples of his school.