The first record of the church of S. Maria Maggiore dates back to 1513, when it is mentioned in a Brief of Pope Leo X. In the sources the church is also known as S. Maria la Grande, probably to distinguish it from an earlier church dedicated to S. Maria Assunta.

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A historical peculiarity of S. Maria Maggiore was that it depended on the Order of the Knights Hospitaller and not on the Diocese of Nicastro, since it stood outside, according to the historian Ardito, that part of the town which Frederick II had redeemed from the Benedictine Abbey in 1240, and thus remained the property of the Benedictines and later of the Hospitallers who succeeded them. Appointing the church's chaplain was therefore the right of the Bailiff of S. Eufemia and not of the Bishop, a situation that gave rise to no shortage of disputes and appeals over the centuries. Later, with the Concordat of 1818, the church came under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Nicastro.

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Accounts report that the high altar was dedicated to the Assumption, while other altars were dedicated to St Michael the Archangel, to the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary and to St Dominic. According to local historians, the church housed a valuable seventeenth-century painting of the Baptist attributed to Carlo Maratta, while the account of the French traveller Aubin-Louis Millin, who visited Nicastro in 1812, mentions an inscribed Roman milestone from the church, where it had evidently been reused as a decorative element. Ardito also tells us that as late as 1889 the coat of arms of the Order of the Knights of Malta was still visible on the ruined façade.

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Having survived the terrible flooding of the Piazza river in 1558, the earthquake of 1638 and the further inundation of 1782, the church faced the river floods that marked the nineteenth century with exceptional frequency, until 1876, when yet another flood destroyed the Terravecchia quarter, causing the church of S. Maria Maggiore to collapse, leaving only part of the façade standing. After the event, most of the population of Terravecchia took shelter in the Bosco di S. Francesco, uphill from the convent of the Reformed Fathers. For this reason, in 1878 don Gennaro Vecchi, parish priest of S. Maria Maggiore, began celebrating mass for his displaced parishioners in the church of S. Francesco, with the approval of the rector don Bruno Gaetano.

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In 1883, through the intervention of Bishop Giuseppe Candido and the good offices of Mayor Cesare Matarasso, the title of the parish of S. Maria Maggiore was transferred to the church of S. Francesco, giving rise to a confusion between church and parish that persists to this day: the church has in fact never changed its title and is still dedicated to St Francis of Assisi, even though it is mistakenly called "S. Maria Maggiore", which is instead the title of the parish, transferred as described after the destruction of the church of the same name.

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In a survey from 1900 the outline of the religious building can still be made out; it stood immediately behind what is now the Hotel Savant, and its last ruins were removed in 1959. In the meantime, a row of buildings had grown up next to the ruined church, housing the workshops of the forgiari (blacksmiths), which gave the square a new character and remained active until the turn of the new millennium. After an initial regeneration carried out by the municipal administration starting in 2011, the square is now at the centre of new urban regeneration projects.