Dedicated to Ferrara's native author par excellence, the first location of the Ariosto Secondary School was at 60 Via Borgoleoni, in the former Jesuit Convent that is now home to the court. The curriculum offered originally focused on the humanities though it now covers a wide variety of subjects.

The main access point to the central campus is at 19 Via Arianuova, entering a 1970s building that was expanded in 2002 with an annex to the original structure in the wing along Via Arianuova. The entire campus however, goes well beyond the façade seen from the street, including a very large garden and extending to Corso Biagio Rossetti and Palazzo Prosperi-Sacrati. The nineteenth-century Gorizia barracks, eventually used as a homeless shelter and demolished in 1969, once stood on the plot of land next to the 2002 annex, facing Corso Ercole I of Este.

Three years prior, the municipal administration had announced a call for proposals to build the Ariosto Secondary School, a competition won by C. Melograni, M.L. Martines, T. Giura Longo, T. Benevolo, G. Marcialis, and A. Samonà with a project that included at least the partial re-purposing of the old barracks. In 1972, the winning plan was changed significantly, reworked by some of the plan's original architects (C. Melograni, M.L. Martines, and T. Giura Longo), to give the main building its current look and use, completed in 1976.

Brutalist in style, the materials and architecture make notable references to industrial buildings. Defined by the use of cement, a smokestack in the central heating plant, and the materials and finishes in the rooms, the ‘new’ secondary school is, in all respects, a factory of knowledge (even the announcement of the lesson schedule was initially entrusted to a loudspeaker). The long, low single-story structure, with direct access to the garden from almost every classroom, sensibly rises vertically with the three-storey wing facing Via Arianuova, built in 2002 and now the main entry point. Standing out for its excellent design and high-quality construction, the Ariosto Secondary School appears in various guidebooks to twentieth-century Italian architecture.

Equipped with numerous laboratories and shared spaces, today it has three permanent exhibition spaces: Historica, on the history of the school; Naturalia, with a historic natural sciences collection; and Strumentaria, dedicated to scientific tools and instruments from the late 1800s to the early 1900s.

The urn of the lead architect that built the school, Carlo Melograni, will some day be kept in the building. Born in Rome in 1924, an emotional bond links him to Ferrara, having also contributed to the city's urban plan of 1975 and the redevelopment of the Barco neighbourhood.

Melograni expressed his desire regarding the placement of his urn in 2016; the city council approved his request in January 2018. As he desires, his ashes will thus be housed ‘near the plaques that honour the memory of the former students who were killed at war’ (C. Melograni, from his letter to the Mayor, Tiziano Tagliani, 2016).

One of the most famous students to sit at the desks of Ariosto Secondary School was Giorgio Bassani. He attended the school while Fascist rule was relatively accepted by the public and before the issuing of Italy’s racial laws (1926-1934). At that time, the school system was structured into three years of lower secondary school, two of upper secondary school, and three of Lyceum, marked by four exams, including the admission exam.

Bassani stood out for the excellent marks he earned on his exams, leading to his inclusion in numerous educational projects reserved for high achievers.

He was an active participant in school, as demonstrated by the numerous memories from that time that have surfaced, including in the literature produced as an adult; and the friendships that arose or were strengthened while at the school proved to be important, such as that with Lanfranco Caretti. One of the most crucial encounters in Bassani's scholastic career was certainly that with Francesco Viviani, the respected Greek and Latin teacher and moral role model who was transferred to Sciacca in 1936 due to his anti-fascist views, then deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp where he died in 1945. Viviani was the inspiration for Professor Guzzo in Behind the Door, the novel written in first-person and dedicated to a cross-section of scholastic life between October 1929 and June 1930. In addition to basing the story on real life events and facts, Bassani's experience as a student often resurfaces.

Ariosto Secondary School has dedicated numerous archival studies to Giorgio Bassani, carried out with the collaboration of students in the form of workshops supervised by teachers, including the collaboration of students from other schools, published in the Liceo Ariosto Notebooks.

A classroom and one of the main atria are named after Bassani. Within the Bassani Atrium is a board with original documents relating to Bassani's experience at the school. There is also a memorial marble plaque which reads: ‘To Giorgio Bassani / from 1926 to 1934 / student of the Ariosto School / in the rooms of Via Borgo dei Leoni / within the old walls. // Ludovico Ariosto Classics Secondary School, Ferrara / 3 December 2002’.

‘Giorgio Bassani attended five years of lower and upper secondary school and three years of lyceum, between 1926 and 1934, at the Ludovico Ariosto Royal Secondary School at 60 Via Borgoleoni, Ferrara. The school was in the old Gesù Convent, a harsh structure with thick walls and high ceilings.

At the time, the Fascist government was widely accepted and the Ariosto Secondary School, the most prestigious school in the city, was involved in many activities required by the Ministry in accordance with the new Fascist cultural policies and guidelines, and by proposals set forth by the local government, aimed at making Ferrara less ‘provincial’. …

The Bassani family, with long-standing, well-to-do Jewish origins, included Giorgio's father, Angelo Enrico (who had a degree in medicine though he tended to the family's land), his mother, Dora Minerbi, and Giorgio's two younger siblings, Paolo and Eugenia (Jenny). After Italy's racial laws went into effect in 1938, Eugenia was expelled from the public secondary school and began attending private classes at the school in Via Vignatagliata. Bassani's paternal grandparents - Davide Bassani (a fabric merchant) and Jenny Hannau - lived in the family's stately home in Via Cisterna del Follo, with orchards and vegetable gardens almost reaching Corso Giovecca (one of the city’s main avenues). Bassani's early life was meant to be like any other child born to a well-to-do family at the time: public school, usually classics secondary school, private music and art lessons, tennis lessons at Marfisa, skiing, fencing. The only difference between him and non-Jewish students was that he went to Temple on Via Mazzini and, after the Lateran Treaty of 1929, he was exempt from religion class’. (C. Bartoluzzi, C. Cassai, ‘L’Ariosto e la Città’, in Il Filo della Memoria. Giorgio Bassani Studente dell’Ariosto. Laboratorio di Ricerca Didattica e Culturale, Ed. S. Onofri, L. Ariosto Secondary School, Ferrara 2004, p. 23).

‘His first poem, like he would state later on, or rather, his ‘first metered experiment’ came about... while at the desks of Ariosto Secondary School. “I put it together”, those are his words, “when I was in secondary school. My classmate wrote poetry. Seeing my classmate write verses (in my dabbling I didn’t suppose they were written any more, verses that is, that poetry was a thing of the past, and that poets were no longer), inspired me to imitate him. One always begins by imitation, going to a workshop. The first workshop I went to was that of my classmate, at the school’ (as told by Paola Bassani, daughter of the writer and President of the Giorgio Bassani Foundation, in G. Mori, P. Bassani, S. Onofri, ‘Quattro Marzo’, in Il Filo della Memoria. Giorgio Bassani Studente dell’Ariosto. Laboratorio di Ricerca Didattica e Culturale, p. 13)

‘And your name is?’

I stammered out my surname.

Guzzo was famous for his nastiness, a nastiness bordering on sadism. About fifty years old, tall, Herculean, with big, blazing, greenish reptilian eyes beneath an enormous Wagnerian forehead, and two long grey sideburns which grew halfway down his bony cheeks, he was deemed a kind of genius at the Guarini School (it was he who had composed the epigraph for the fallen of the First World War so conspicuously emblazoned on the entrance corridor: ‘Mors domuit corpora – Vicit mortem virtus’). He wasn’t enrolled in the Fascist party and because of this, and only because of this, everybody said, he hadn’t been granted the university chair which various of his philological writings, published in Germany, would otherwise surely have warranted.

...’To which part of the fifth form did you belong, A or B?’

‘B.’

He made a wry face.

‘Ah, to B. Good. And how have you got here? With one flying jump or – forgive my poor memory – are you trying a second time?’

‘I have to retake maths in October.’

‘And only maths?’

I nodded.

‘Are you sure you don’t have to “retake” – ugly but serviceable word – any other subjects? Latin or Greek, for example?’

I shook my head.

‘Are you quite sure?’ he insisted with feline meekness.

I denied it again.

‘Well then, my good fellow, pay attention. I wouldn’t want for you to have to retake Latin and Greek as well as maths this summer … quod Deus avertat … three subjects … you do catch my drift, don’t you?’

He asked me how I had done in ginnasio, and if I had ever been held back a year. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking around as though he thought me untrustworthy and was soliciting testimony from whoever was willing to supply it.

‘He always does well. One of the best,’ someone dared to venture, perhaps Pavani, there, in the first desk in the front row.’ (G. Bassani, ‘Behind the Door’, in The Novel of Ferrara, translated by Jamie McKendrick, Penguin Classics, 2018, e-book location 7536 - 7554)

‘Home, 13/6/1936 XIV // Dear Professor, // the news of the // incredible measure that // strikes you, has produced in me pain // that can only be overwhelmed // by immense amazement: // such an enormity I cannot believe that one can commit with impunity // against a man such as you. I // who for three years have been your stu- // dent — one of the closest — I know, in its depths // your firm nobility , // your knowledge, your righteousness // and goodness. I am now grateful to remember, // in this painful moment, these chosen // qualities of yours, and all the more so because // it is due to them in particular that I have grown // into a man today, in the fullness of // a soul open to all beauty, to // every height; a man, in the boundless love // that I bring to freedom and justice. // With my best wishes and with my // most vivacious solidarity // believe me, respected professor, your // fondest // Giorgio Bassani. // Giorgio Bassani Via Cisterna del Follo 1’ (original document stored at the Viviani Archive in Verona; quoted in V. Santato, Un Intellettuale nell’Antifascismo. Francesco Viviani (1891-1945): dall’«Italia libera» a Buchenwald, Rovigo Minelliana 1987, p. 96)