San Cosimato Complex

The Presidio Nuovo Regina Margherita overlooks Piazza San Cosimato, just a few steps from Viale Trastevere. The hospital is annexed to the ancient Church of San Cosimato, built in the 10th century.

The oldest part stands around two cloisters dating from different periods: the 13th and 15th centuries.

According to a document from the ‘Regesto Farfense’, the Roman nobleman Benedetto Campagna founded, around the mid-10th century, a monastery dedicated to Sts. Cosma e Damiano in ‘mica aurea’ (because it was built on the sand found on the slopes of the Janiculum Hill, which has a slightly golden colour), better known as St. Cosimato, a name later derived from the contraction of the two names.

Cosma and Damiano were two brothers who were doctors (known as ‘anargyroi’, meaning ‘silverless’, because they treated the poor for free) who were beheaded, after prolonged torture, under Diocletian in 303 in Cyrus, near Antioch, where they were buried. The construction of the monastery was completed in 1069, and that same year Pope Alexander II consecrated the church, as recalled by the tombstone discovered in 1892 and still preserved here. In 1229, Pope Gregory IX assigned the monastery to the Camaldolese Benedictines, who remained there until 1234, when the pontiff decided to entrust it to a group of “Poverelle” sent by St. Clare, who at the time was cloistered with her companions in the monastery of St. Damian in Assisi (for this reason also called the Cloistered Sisters of St. Damian or Poor Clares), with the aim, as the Pope stated, “of mitigating, through a life of prayer and sacrifice, God’s wrath upon the Eternal City”. This would confirm the popular rumour that the monastery’s reallocation to the Poor Clares was due to the ‘incorrect’ behaviour and management of the Benedictines. In 1246, the Poor Clares undertook an initial renovation of both the church and the convent building, thanks, in part, to the funds made available by the family of Abbess Jacopa Cenci. Despite further restoration work over the following two centuries, by 1475 the entire complex had fallen into total disrepair. To prevent its complete ruin, Pope Sixtus IV commissioned the rebuilding of the church and part of the monastery from the foundations.

The monastery ceased to function as a convent on 12 August 1891, when the abbess received an official order to leave St. Cosimato, accompanied by a deed of expropriation of the Religious Congregation and a subsequent deed of Transfer and Handover of the monastery to the Municipality of Rome for its conversion into a hospice.

Later, the structure underwent numerous transformations: a shelter for poor and sick elderly people; the Umberto I Hospice in St. Cosimato; in 1925, it became part of the Istituti Riuniti di Assistenza e Beneficenza di Roma (United Institutes of Assistance and Charity of Rome), until the 1960s, when the construction of a hospital specialising in orthopaedics and surgery began. The building was renovated by the architect Alegiani and the engineer Secchi and inaugurated in March 1970 as Ospedale Nuovo Regina Margherita.

San Cosimato Complex ph. Turismo Roma