Cloister of Santa Maria della Rosa (Chiostro di Santa Maria della Rosa)

The church of Santa Maria della Rosa was originally known as Santa Maria de Templo (or of the Temple), as from the end of the 13th century it was the Ferrara seat of the Order of the Knights of the Temple. The ancient Templar affiliation is mentioned on a plaque placed outside the reconstructed cloister. From the 15th century, it took the name of Santa Maria del Guazzaduro or della Roxa (= canal), which was later changed to Rosa, as a watering place for horses had been created nearby.

Originally outside the city, flanking the ancient ditch around the walls, west of the Porta dei Leoni, in 1492 it was included in the city centre thanks to the Addizione by Ercole I d’Este. In 1495, the duke built three chapels there, while in 1501 the presbytery area was rebuilt in a larger form as part of a vast campaign to revisit Ferrara’s liturgical space. 

The church was devastated by the bombings of 1944 and never rebuilt. The adjacent cloister was rebuilt at the end of the 1950s, only to be incorporated by the buildings built around it, with the singular result of a composite cloister in the middle of the high-rise buildings; at least some of the columns (in the north-west corner), characterised by their strongly accentuated entasis, are original.