The origins of the religious site are linked to the presence of a hospital managed, probably as early as the thirteenth century, by the order of the Spedalieri di San Giacomo d’Altopascio in Val di Nievole, of which it served as a chapel annexed to the hospital itself, a point of reference for wayfarers and pilgrims who descended from the Apennine passes of the upper Lunigiana along the Via Francigena and Via Lombarda. During the refurbishment works of the Chapel, during the demolition of a perimeter wall, a mason did not take into account the presence of a fresco depicting the Madonna and Child and set about demolishing it; as soon as the chisel struck the image, the mason was paralyzed and, having invoked the Virgin, he was able to recover only after a few hours. Thus was born the devotion to the Madonna del Soccorso, still very much alive today in Pontremoli; in 1508 the General Council of Pontremoli erected a monastery of Nuns which, with the prior concession of the Master General of the Friars of the Altopascio Hospital, was assigned to the Cloistered Nuns of the Order of Sant’Agostino who took possession of it in 1514, at the end of the construction works of the new Church and Convent. The Monastery of San Giacomo was suppressed in 1785 and was transformed into a women’s conservatory.

Numerous interventions were carried out in the almost three centuries of life of the Convent for the embellishment of the Church. In addition to the chapel in which the image of the “Madonna del Soccorso” is venerated, which remained located in the original site, visible only through a grate placed in the center of a beautiful sixteenth-century wooden altar, probable reference to the ancient function of hostel and shelter of the church. In the opposite chapel the Image of the Virgin and Child is venerated, inserted in a beautiful seventeenth-century canvas where the Madonna appears in sacred conversation with various saints.

The presbytery area is impressive, where, on the large wall on which the main altar rests, a large perspective appears created by Antonio Contestabili in the 1770s to surround the magnificent altar in mixed marble which contains one of the main Pontremoli works by Giuseppe Bottani, the “Ascension of Jesus Christ”. On the same wall there are two niches containing two Carrara marble statues depicting two saints and, immediately behind the altar table, a large grate behind which the cloistered nuns listened to Holy Mass. On the counter-faà§ade, protected by a wooden compass from the second half of the 19th century, is the choir loft with the organ. A final decorative intervention was carried out in the second half of the 19th century when the Parma painter Filippo Bocchi was entrusted with furnishing the large vaulted ceiling.

The facade, now without plaster, shows clear traces of the frames and the three windows of the original facade (before the elevation).

Also of great interest is the part behind the Church where the refectory stood from one wall of which a sixteenth-century fresco depicting the Crucifixion has been detached, currently located in the parish church of San Pietro.