Three centuries of cloister
The Monastery of St. Clare opened in 1609 as the seat of the Poor Clares' religious community, the female order born from the Franciscan rule of Clare of Assisi. The cloister required a strict isolation from the outside world: the nuns devoted the day to prayer, manual work and the study of sacred texts, leaving the monastery only on exceptional grounds. The monastery was for over three centuries a female religious stronghold and a defining element of the urban fabric of the chief town.
The building is laid out on several floors around a central cloister, with the church on the eastern side and the communal rooms (refectory, chapter rooms, cells) along the perimeter corridors. The garden, accessible only from inside, was the daily place of rest of the religious community: medicinal plants, vegetables and a few fruit trees provided the essential resources of the community.
1971: a new home
In 1971 the community of the Poor Clares left the monastery in the historic centre to move to the new convent built at Valdragone, a locality of the Castello of Borgo Maggiore. The change of seat answered the need to adapt the spaces to modern religious life, with surfaces and services that the old seventeenth-century building could no longer guarantee. The historic building was therefore handed over to the Republic for civil and cultural use.
From the cloister to the campus
After complete refurbishment, the complex today hosts two institutions of weight: the University of San Marino, founded in 1985, and the Museum of the Emigrant. The University occupies most of the building with classrooms, administrative offices and the academic Council Hall. The Museum of the Emigrant, opened in 1997, gathers documents, photographs, objects and testimonies on the Sammarinese diaspora to the United States, Argentina, France and Belgium between the late nineteenth and the second half of the twentieth century.
«A building that had hosted the silence of the nuns found a new silence: that of students bent over their books, of the faded photographs of the emigrants.»
A space of rest
The original garden, kept inside the walls of the complex, preserves part of the seventeenth-century layout with medicinal plants, a fountain and tall trees. In the past it hosted the Poor Clares in their moments of daily pause; today it is open to the public on specific occasions, especially on the days of University activity. Access takes place from the inner courtyard, with entrance from Contrada Omerelli.
The Monastery of St. Clare is part of the circuit of the monuments of the historic centre inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The visit is often combined with that of the nearby Basilica of Saint Marinus and of the Public Palace, a few minutes' walk away on Contrada Omerelli.