As early as around the year 1,000, Augustinian monks devoted to St. Anthony, considered the founder of Christian monasticism, had settled on the small island created at the confluence of the then two branches of the Po: the Primaro and the Volano.

In 1257 the marquis purchased the entire area and the ancient buildings from the fathers, and the following year Beatrice and her companions moved into the convent, which was, however, in need of work and expansion. The new church was most likely designed on the basis of a three-nave plan, later transformed into a simple hall, respecting the Benedictine tradition.  

Modifications and stratifications followed one another over the centuries, so that traces of decorations in Byzantine use (also traceable in the nearby Pomposa Abbey) are accompanied by Romanesque and Gothic elements, up to altars and decorations typical of seventeenth-century Ferrara. The present church is divided into two spaces reserved for the faithful and the nuns, respectively. If the part dedicated to the laity today presents a fully Baroque appearance, strongly characterized by the large ceiling frescoed by Francesco Ferrari, the interior part for the exclusive use of the Benedictine nuns, on the other hand, preserves large portions of the ancient fresco decoration of the Giotto school, as well as the nuns’ wooden choir and other fifteenth- and sixteenth-century works.  

After the Napoleonic suppressions of 1796, subsequent transformations and other complex events, in 1910 the Municipality of Ferrara purchased the monastery, entrusting it once again to the custody of the Benedictine nuns. The monastery still preserves, in the northern wing of the cloister, the tomb of Blessed Beatrice d’Este from whose marble tomb periodically drips a water known as the “Tears of the Blessed,” considered “prodigious” by the Catholic Church.