It is the most famous charterhouse in world literature, and in Stendhal's novel it barely appears, in the closing lines. The real monastery was founded in 1285 by the will of a Parma prelate who had become bishop of Spoleto, and the Carthusians stayed almost five centuries, until the suppression of 1769.
What to see
The layout is the order's classic one, organised on four poles: the entrance court with the church, the small cloister with the chapter house, the great cloister onto which the monks' cells opened, and the lay brothers' quarter with the kitchens, the store and the bakehouse. Around them lay the gardens and the wall of enclosure.
Little is left of the thirteenth-century building, because the monks remade it piece by piece over the centuries: the refectory in the fifteenth, the two cloisters in Renaissance forms between the end of that century and the start of the next. A bishop's chancellor judged it, in the middle of the sixteenth century, the finest monastery in the diocese after the Benedictine abbey in town.
Visiting
The charterhouse is in strada della Certosa, on the edge of Parma towards Mantua; since 1975 it has held a training school of the prison police with a few hundred students, and for this reason it is not visited, apart from special openings on particular occasions. An hour when it is open.
Our editors' tip
If you are set on getting in, watch for the open-monument days in spring and autumn: they are the only realistic chance, and they must be booked early because places run out. Otherwise there remains the paradox of a place known the world over for the title of a book that does not describe it, and that almost nobody has seen.