Located at the centre of the Graziosa valley at just 10 km. from Pisa, the Charterhouse of Calci is one of the biggest monastic complexes in Tuscany. It was founded at the feet of Mount Pisano and it houses the Natural History and Territory Museum on the inside.

The Archbishop of Pisa Francesco Moricotti founded the Charterhouse in May in 1366. The works were financed with the patrimony of a rich Pisan merchant of Armenian origins, Pietro Mirante della Vergine, who expressed the wish that an abbey was built with his goods a his last will. It was also because of the founding of the complex that what was once called "Valle Buia" was now called "Valle Graziosa".
In the last years of the XIV century the Refectory, the Chapterhouse, the Church, the friars' cell and the rooms of the lay brothers were finished. The latter were committed the productive activity of the monastery linked to agriculture, wine production and iron and timber manufacture. In 1425, the Charterhouse definitively became a centre with a great prestige and political power with the acquisition of the ancient and once very rich Benedictine monastery in the isle of Gorgona.
Later, the convent went through numerous other enlargement works by benefiting from the continuous donations that the most illustrious Pisan families gave in the hope to grant themselves their indulgence in Paradise.
In the XVII century, the cloister and the fountain were carried out. Its current appearance, yet, is due to the works carried out between 1764 and 1797 above all and they were carried by the prior Alfonso Maria Maggi, thanks to whom many painters were called to decorate old and new rooms with their frescoes. the Pisan painter Pietro Giarré listed the names of lineages and merchant families who contributed to these works. He reproduced their emblems inside fake niches created by Luigi Pochini at the end of XVIII century. They can still be observed along the corridor of the "Foresterie Nobili".
Napoleon's laws that caused the disappearance of all the religious brotherhoods, suppressed the Charterhouse in 1808 and it became part of the state property. Yet, the Carthusian order kept living there until 1972. In 1978, the University of Pisa equipped the west wing of the complex as a museum open to the public. Numerous collections linked to the territory of Pisa, with part of the patrimony of the Orto Botanico of Pisa and with pieces of an exceptionally geological, paleontological and biological importance can be admired in the Museum.