The cloister at the north edge of the Campo dei Miracoli is the fourth of the great buildings, completed in 1464. It was built around earth that Crusaders had reportedly brought back from Calvary, supposedly so that the buried Pisans would rest in holy ground. Sixty Gothic arches frame a long rectangular court lined with ancient Roman sarcophagi, repurposed as tombs for wealthy medieval Pisans.
The fourteenth-century fresco cycles on the walls — particularly the apocalyptic Triumph of Death, the Last Judgment, and the Hell scenes — are some of the most ambitious painting of their century anywhere in Europe. Allied bombing in 1944 nearly destroyed them; their slow recovery is one of the great stories of post-war Italian conservation, and the gallery rooms at the end of the cloister show what the restorers are working with.