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Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza | Department of Law 133

due to its 1847 transformation into the Pio Istituto Orfanelle chapel, es-
tablished in 1870 in the area around the cloister. It is currently used as
the Great Hall (Aula Magna) of the Department of Law. On the back
wall there is still a piece of a fresco with View from a Castle.
One area of great interest is the incredibly spacious hall with a wood-
trussed ceiling, now room N, located on the first floor overlooking via
San Geminiano. Presumably it was a dormitory, with the windows facing
north towards the outside, in a upper position with respect to the ones
on the opposite side, which overlooked the loggia on the cloister, in or-
der to avoid prying eyes coming both from the inside and outside – in
compliance with the strict rules for cloistered communities issued after
the Concilio di Trento. A restoration work retrieved on the eastern wall a
15th century fresco depicting the Madonna col Bambino (The Vergin Mary
with the Child) which follows the iconography of the nursing Madonnas.
In the areas which have been recently restored remain elements which
recall the monastery’s flourishing past. Some examples are the frag-
ments of a frescoed frieze, presumably from the 16th century, in a room
of the first floor, now room S, depicting Santa Caterina d’Alessandria –
recognisable from the attribute of the martyrdom toothed wheel – and
presumably San Nicola da Tolentino.
Of more recent era, a mix between the late baroque and the neoclassi-
cism, are the marian monogram within a polylobed frame among flo-
ral elements and the baldachin respectively painted in the vault and on
one of the walls of the small staircase, to the north-west of the cloister,
but originally they were decorations of a chapel dedicated to the Virgin
Mary.
In the cloister, as reported by Ligi Francesco Valdrighi, in 1875 a grave
was found with a Latin epigraph which testified to the construction
of a “topiarium or an arbour for the nuns” by a noble from the Molza
family in 1688. Apart from the monumental cloister, the monastery

Monastery’s internal church, now great hall on the first floor of the Department of Law
Today’s room S on the first floor of the Department of Law
where there are visible the 16th century frescoed frieze fragments
Small staircase, to the north-west of the cloister