Padua

• 1. Introduction

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  Padua sits on the banks of the Bacchiglione river, 40 kilometres west of Venice, and it has been accumulating firsts for longer than most cities have existed. The world's oldest botanical garden is here. So is one of the oldest universities on earth, dating to 1222. In 1610, Galileo Galilei looked through a homemade telescope in Padua and observed the moons of Jupiter, a moment that marked the second phase of the Copernican Revolution. A city of around 207,000 people today, Padua carries the weight of nearly three thousand years of habitation, invasion, scholarship, and survival. How does a city that was burned to the ground by the Lombards, bombed by Allied aircraft in the Second World War, and ruled in succession by Trojan princes, Roman senators, medieval warlords, and Venetian governors end up producing the first woman to earn a university degree anywhere in the world? That question, and others like it, run through everything Padua has left behind.

• 2. A City Before Rome

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  According to a tradition recorded at least as early as Virgil's Aeneid and Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, Padua was founded around 1183 BC by the Trojan prince Antenor. After the fall of Troy, Antenor led a group of Trojans and their Paphlagonian allies, a people called the Eneti or Veneti, to settle the Euganean plain. When a large stone sarcophagus was exhumed in 1274, the medieval commune declared the bones inside to be Antenor's own. A native humanist scholar named Lovato Lovati wrote an inscription for the tomb, identifying the remains as those of the noble founder who "banished the Euganeans and founded Padua." More recent tests place the sarcophagus somewhere between the 4th and 3rd centuries BC; archaeological evidence, however, confirms that the centre of the settlement dates back to between the 11th and 10th centuries BC.

  By the 5th century BC Padua stood on the banks of the river then known as the Medoacus Maior, a waterway that probably traced the course of what is now the Bacchiglione. The Veneti of Padua proved difficult to conquer. Around 302 BC the Spartan king Cleonimos led an invasion up the river and was defeated in a naval battle. The Etruscans and Gauls were also repulsed. By 226 BC, according to Livy and Silius Italicus, the Veneti had allied with Rome against those same enemies, and Paduan men fought and died alongside Roman legions at Cannae.

  Assimilation into the Roman Republic came gradually. In 175 BC the city asked Rome for help putting down a local civil war. In 91 BC its citizens fought with Rome in the Social War. Sometime around the mid-1st century BC, Padua became a Roman municipium under the Lex Julia Municipalis, its citizens enrolled in the Roman tribe called Fabia. At that time the city's population stood at perhaps 40,000. Padua became celebrated for its horse-breeding and the quality of its wool, and the poet Martial singled out the thickness of the tunics made there. By the close of the first century BC it was reportedly the wealthiest city in Italy outside Rome itself.

• 3. Sacked, Besieged, Rebuilt

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  Attila the Hun sacked Padua savagely in 450 AD. The city then fell to the Gothic kings Odoacer and Theodoric, was briefly recaptured by the Byzantine Empire in 540, and was seized again by the Goths under Totila before being returned to the Eastern Empire by the general Narses. In 568 the Lombards took control. During these convulsive decades, many Paduans sought refuge in the lagoons that would one day become Venice.

  In 601 the city rose in revolt against Agilulf, the Lombard king, who responded by laying siege. The siege lasted twelve years. When the Lombards finally stormed the city they burned it. Nearly every trace of Roman Padua vanished: only the remains of an amphitheatre called the Arena and a few bridge foundations survived. The ruling class fled to the Venetian Lagoon. The townspeople who stayed returned to live among the ruins.

  The Magyars delivered another devastating sack in 899, and recovery was slow. Padua's situation shifted only in the early 11th century, when citizens established a constitution with a general council and an executive body called the credenza. Wars with Venice and Vicenza followed, fought over rights of passage on the Bacchiglione and the Brenta. By 1138 the city was confident enough to entrust its government to two consuls. A fire in 1174 destroyed much of what had been rebuilt, requiring the virtual reconstruction of the city again.

• 4. Lords and Scholars

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  Frederick II placed his vicar Ezzelino III da Romano in Padua in 1236, and Ezzelino practised, in the source's own words, "frightful cruelties" on the inhabitants. He was unseated in June 1256 without civilian bloodshed, thanks to Pope Alexander IV. Padua then entered a calmer period. The basilica of the saint was begun. The city became master of Vicenza.

  The University of Padua had been founded in 1222, the second university in Italy after Bologna. As the 13th century progressed, Padua outpaced Bologna by expanding humanist research beyond the field of law. That ambition brought Padua into conflict with Can Grande della Scala, lord of Verona, and by 1311 the city had to yield to the Scaligeri.

  Jacopo da Carrara was elected lord of Padua in 1318, when the city again held a population of 40,000. Nine members of the Carraresi family ruled in succession until 1405, interrupted by a period of Scaligeri overlordship and two years when Giangaleazzo Visconti held the city. The family's record was mixed. Albertino Mussato, described as the first modern poet laureate, died in exile at Chioggia in 1329 after the early humanist circles at the university were disbanded. Yet in 1387 the English mercenary captain John Hawkwood won the Battle of Castagnaro for Padua against Giovanni Ordelaffi, defending the city from Verona. Francesco Petrarch, poet of the Italian Renaissance and one of the earliest humanists, served as a canon at Padua Cathedral, invited by Francesco I da Carrara. Petrarch lived in his canonical house on via Dietro Duomo from 1349, and the residence served as a gathering point for the Carrara princes and for Giovanni Boccaccio.

• 5. Under the Sign of Venice

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  Padua came under the rule of the Republic of Venice in 1405 and remained there, with one brief interruption, until 1797. That interruption came in 1509 during the wars of the League of Cambrai. On the 10th of December 1508, the Papacy, France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Ferdinand V of Castile signed an agreement to dismember Venice's territory entirely; the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I of the House of Habsburg was to receive Padua. Imperial supporters held the city for just a few weeks before Venetian troops recovered it and successfully defended it under siege.

  Venice governed through two nobles: a podesta for civil affairs and a captain for military affairs, each elected for sixteen months. The city's existing law, codified in statutes of 1276 and 1362, continued to operate under these governors. Venice also fortified Padua thoroughly, building new walls between 1507 and 1544 and adding a series of monumental gates.

  It was in this Venetian period that the university reached heights it has rarely since equalled. Under Venetian rule it was administered by a board of three patricians called the Riformatori dello Studio di Padova. The roster of those who studied or taught there includes Copernicus, Vesalius, Fallopius, William Harvey, and Galileo Galilei. In 1678 Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia became the first woman in the world to graduate from a university, doing so at Padua. The university also built the oldest anatomy theatre in the world in 1594. The botanical garden, founded in 1545 as a collection of curative herbs for the faculty of medicine, was funded by the Venetian Senate so that knowledge of herbal remedies would reduce errors made by pharmacists; the Senate then funded field trips to gather plants from around the world.

• 6. Art Accumulated Over Centuries

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  Giotto completed his fresco cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel in 1305. The chapel was commissioned by Enrico degli Scrovegni, a wealthy banker, as a private chapel once attached to his family's palazzo; it stands on the site of a Roman arena, which is why it is also known as the Arena Chapel. The cycle depicts the life of the Virgin Mary and includes one of the earliest representations of a kiss in the history of art, a scene called "Meeting at the Golden Gate" dated to 1305. Visitors today spend fifteen minutes in a climate-controlled, airlocked vault before entering, a measure designed to stabilize temperature and protect the frescoes from moisture and mold.

  Donatello's equestrian statue of the Venetian general Erasmo da Narni, known as Gattamelata, stands in the piazza in front of the Basilica of Saint Anthony. Cast in 1453, it was the first full-size equestrian bronze cast since antiquity, inspired by the Marcus Aurelius sculpture at the Capitoline Hill in Rome. The basilica itself, dedicated to Saint Anthony of Padua, was begun around 1230 and completed over the following century; tradition holds that Nicola Pisano designed it. It is covered by seven cupolas, two of them pyramidal.

  The Palazzo della Ragione, whose great hall is reputed to have the largest unsupported roof in Europe at 81.5 metres long and 24 metres high, was begun in 1172 and finished in 1219. After a fire in 1420, Venetian architects removed the internal partition walls and threw the three original chambers into one vast Salone. The new space was frescoed by Nicolo Miretto and Stefano da Ferrara, who worked from 1425 to 1440. The presence of the university drew other artists to the city across the centuries: Fra Filippo Lippi and Donatello both came, and the sculptor Antonio Canova produced his first work in Padua.

• 7. War Arrives at the Doorstep

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  When Italy entered the First World War on the 24th of May 1915, Padua became the main command of the Italian Army. King Vittorio Emanuele III and the commander in chief Luigi Cadorna both moved to the city for the duration. After Italy's defeat at the Battle of Caporetto in the autumn of 1917, the front line settled on the river Piave, just 50-60 kilometres from Padua, and the city fell within range of Austrian artillery. The military command stayed. The city was bombed repeatedly, with around one hundred civilian deaths. One episode in particular stands out: the aviator Gabriele D'Annunzio flew from the nearby San Pelagio Castle airfield all the way to Vienna. The threat ended in late October 1918 when the Italian Army won the decisive Battle of Vittorio Veneto. The armistice that concluded the Italian campaign was signed at Villa Giusti, Padua, on the 3rd of November 1918.

  The Second World War brought far greater destruction. From December 1943 to the end of the war, Allied aircraft bombed Padua twenty-four times. The heaviest raids fell on the 16th and the 30th of December 1943 and the 7th of February 1944, each causing around 300 deaths. On the 11th of March 1944, 111 bombers dropped over 300 tons of bombs on the city. The northern district of Arcella saw 96 percent of its buildings destroyed. Overall, 950 homes were destroyed and 1,400 damaged, and some 2,000 inhabitants were killed. The Church of the Eremitani, which contained frescoes by Andrea Mantegna, was largely destroyed; some art historians consider it Italy's biggest wartime cultural loss. One of the principal leaders of the resistance in the city was the university vice-chancellor, Concetto Marchesi. On the 26th of April 1945, partisans launched the final insurrection; 224 partisans and 497 Germans were killed in the fighting, and 5,000 German troops, including three generals, surrendered to the partisans in Padua. A small Commonwealth War Cemetery in the west of the city marks where soldiers of the 2nd New Zealand Division entered on the 28th of April.

• 8. A City Still at Work

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  Padua's industrial zone, created in the eastern part of the city in 1946, has grown into one of the largest in Europe, covering an area of 11 million square metres and providing the main offices for around 1,300 industries that employ 50,000 people. The zone contains two railway stations, a fluvial port, three truck terminals, and two highway exits. According to data from the Italian Ministry of the Economy and Finances, the average per capita gross income in Padua was 30,134 euros for 2022, well above the Italian average of 20,039 euros.

  The University of Padua still shapes the city in every dimension: it enrols around 72,000 students and its botanical garden, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site alongside the city's 14th-century frescoes, continues to hold an important collection of rare plants descended from those early Venetian-funded expeditions. The university also hosts the Prato della Valle, a 90,000-square-metre elliptical square lined by 78 statues of illustrious citizens, created by Andrea Memmo in the late 18th century, which ranks among the largest squares in Europe.

  The rugby club Petrarca Padova, which has produced Italian internationals including Mauro Bergamasco, Mirco Bergamasco, Marco Bortolami, Andrea Marcato, and Leonardo Ghiraldini, has won fourteen national championships between 1970 and 2022. The footballer Alessandro Del Piero began his professional career in Padova. Bartolomeo Cristofori, inventor of the piano, was born in Padua in 1655. The city that produced Livy, Galileo, and the world's first female university graduate still sends students into fields that shape everything from music to mathematics.