The intervention concerns the restoration of the Benedictine cloisters of San Pietro, an extraordinary monumental complex in the city of Reggio Emilia, an ancient monastery unused for centuries, with the aim of opening it to the city and public use. The complex has undergone many vicissitudes that over the centuries have transformed it into a civil court, military barracks, girls’ school. As a military area then decommissioned in the late twentieth century, this place represented an inaccessible space in the heart of the historic city until the moment of the recent rediscovery for sporadic events. The project involved three closely related interventions in a single operation. The first concerned the conservative restoration of the monumental body. The second involved the demolition of the volumes dating back to the most recent military occupation and the reconstruction on the same footprint of the new building of the Urban Open Laboratories, in close relationship with the monumental complex. The third intervention involved the redevelopment of the courtyard spaces and the areas behind them that persist between the buildings, formerly connected to the monastery, discovering its function as a public crossing and as a space for interaction open to the city.