On 1 June 1499, with the bull Cogitantes humanae conditionis, Pope Alexander VI recognized the right of the St. Roch Archconfraternity of hosts and boatmen, based at Ripetta, to build a church, an oratory and a hospital on a plot of land close to the Mausoleum of Augustus and to dedicate them to the patron Saint Roch.

A group of cabins, superimposed on each other and perched on the walls of the Mausoleum, was home to families, which made a living from port related activities.

If a celata died in childbirth, her body was buried in a reserved cemetery outside Porta del Popolo, and her grave was identified with the hospital access number.

The hospital was therefore rebuilt between 1605 and 1612, at a cost of 5,659 scudi, by demolishing two houses leaning to the tomb of Augustus and buying a garden belonging to the nearby church of San Girolamo.

The dispute with the Corea family – owner of the mausoleum of Augustus, where theatre performances were held – was closed by assigning to the Archconfraternity of San Rocco all the archaeological finds brought to light by the excavations under the former building of the hospital.

Curatolo, who examined the documentation at the State Archives of Rome, reports some data: the deaths were more frequent among the celate, since a higher rate of them suffered from tuberculosis, Malarial fever, stomach upset and rickets.

The courses reserved for midwives were held from November to Easter; Obstetrics training for medical university students, from White Sunday until mid-September.

[4] In those years the hosts and boatmen of Ripetta provided abundant housing and food to the university students, who had become more numerous than those enrolled in Theology and Pharmacy.

He asked for delivery rooms apart from the wards and a physiopathological-anatomical cabinet; he wished that the newborns were not hastily separated from the unmarried mothers.

To enhance night-time care, Panunzi asked for a boarding school for midwife students, whose education was to be extended to 18 months.

The doctor Diomede Pantaleoni, Commissioner of the Ospedali Riuniti, ordered to restore the attic, adding bathrooms and tap water, to transform it into a delivery room; he also organized an autopsy cabinet – an unknown practice within the hospital until then – in the basement.

All the women in labor were transferred to the hospital of San Giovanni, where a separate wing into a tower, with 8 beds, was destined for the celate and operated until the end of the 1940s.