Extensively reconstructed after the damage caused by bombing in World War II, and hemmed in by the sprawl that has accompanied its development as the most important economic centre of the Veneto, PADUA (PADOVA) is not immediately the most alluring city in northern Italy. It is, however, one of the most ancient, and plentiful evidence remains of its impressive lineage. A large student population creates a young, vibrant atmosphere and the city has undoubtedly the best nightlife within reach of Venice. As a result, more and more people use Padua as a base from which to make day-trips to its overcrowded neighbour.
A Roman municipium from 45 BC, the city thrived until the barbarian onslaughts and the subsequent Lombard invasion at the start of the seventh century. Recovery was slow, but by the middle of the twelfth century, when it became a free commune, Padua was prosperous once again. The university was founded in 1221, and a decade later the city became a place of pilgrimage following the death here of St Anthony.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The city of Padua (Lat. Patavium, It. Padova) is the economic and communications hub of the Veneto region in northern Italy. The capital of
Padova province, it stands on the Bacchiglione river, 40km west
of Venice and 29km southeast of Vicenza,
with a population of 211,985 (2004). Its agricultural setting is the Pianura
Padovana, the "Paduan plain," edged by the Euganaean Hills praised by Lucan and Martial, Petrarch and Ugo Foscolo. The city is picturesque, with a dense network of arcaded streets opening into large communal
piazze, and many bridges crossing the various branches of the Bacchiglione, which once surrounded the ancient walls like a
moat.
Padua was where most of the action in Shakespeare's play, The Taming of the Shrew, took place.
Monuments of the historic center
The Palazzo della
Ragione, with its great hall on the upper floor, is reputed to have the largest roof unsupported by columns in Europe; the
hall is nearly rectangular, its length 815m, its breadth 27m, and its height 24m; the walls are covered with allegorical frescoes; the building stands upon
arches, and the upper storey is surrounded by an open loggia, not unlike that which surrounds the basilica of Vicenza. The Palazzo was begun in 1172 and finished in
1219; in 1306 Fra Giovanni, an Augustinian friar,
covered the whole with one roof; originally there were three roofs, spanning the three chambers into which the hall was at first
divided; the internal partition walls remained till the fire of 1420, when the Venetian
architects who undertook the restoration removed them, throwing all three spaces into one and forming the present great hall, the
Salone. The new space was refrescoed by Nicolo' Miretto and Stefano da Ferrara, working from 1425 to 1440.
In the Piazza dei
Signori is the beautiful loggia called the Gran Guardia, (1493 - 1526), and
close by is the Palazzo del Capitanio, the residence of the Venetian governors, with its great door, the work of
Falconetto of
Verona, 1532.
The most famous of the Paduan churches is the basilica dedicated to Saint
Anthony of Padua, locally simply called "Il Santo." The bones of
the saint rest in a chapel richly ornamented with carved marbles, the work of various artists, among them of Sansovino and Falconetto; the basilica was begun
about the year 1230 and completed in the following century; tradition says that the
building was designed by Nicola Pisano; it is covered by seven cupolas, two of them pyramidal. On the piazza in front of the church is Donatello's magnificent equestrian statue of "Gattamelata" ( Erasmo da Narni), the Venetian general (1438-1441), which was cast in 1453, the
first full-size equestrian bronze cast since antiquity.
The Eremitani is an Augustinian
church of the 13th century, distinguished as containing the tombs of
Jacopo (1324) and Ubertino (1345) da Carrara, lords of Padua, and for the chapel of SS James and Christopher, formerly
illustrated by Mantegna's frescoes, largely destroyed in World War II. Now the disused church houses the municipal art gallery. Close by the
Eremitani is the small church of the Annunziata, known as the Madonna dell'Arena, containing the Scrovegni chapel, whose inner walls are entirely
covered with paintings by Giotto.
Padua has long been famous for its university, founded by
Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor,
in 1238. Under the rule of Venice the university was governed by a board of three
patricians, called the Riformatori dello Studio di Padova. The list of professors and alumni is long and illustrious,
containing, among others, the names of Bembo, Sperone Speroni, the anatomist
Vesalius, Acquapendente, Galileo Galilei, Pomponazzi, Pole, Scaliger, Tasso and Sobieski.
The place of Padua in the history of art is nearly as important as its place in the history of learning. The presence of the
university attracted many distinguished artists, as Giotto, Fra
Filippo Lippi and Donatello; and for native art there was the school of Francesco Squarcione (1394-1474), whence issued the great Mantegna (1431-1506).
The industry of Padua has greatly developed in modern times. Corn and saw mills, distilleries, chemical factories, breweries,
candle-works, ink-works, foundries, agricultural machine and automobile works, have been established and are flourishing. The
trade of the district has grown to such an extent that Padua has become the central market for the whole of Veneto.
History of Padua
Padua claims to be the oldest city in north Italy; the early
medieval commune justified itself by a fabled founder in the Trojan Antenor, whose relics the commune recognized in a large stone sarcophagus exhumed in the year
1274. The historical Padua inhabited by Veneti
thrived thanks to its excellent breed of horses and the wool of its sheep. Its men fought for the Romans at Cannae, and the city (a Roman municipium since 45 BCE (query
43?)) became so powerful that it was reported able to raise two hundred thousand
fighting men. Abano nearby is the birthplace of the historian Livy, and Padua was the native place of Valerius
Flaccus, Asconius Pedianus and Thrasea Paetus. Padua, in common with
north-eastern Italy, suffered severely from the invasion of the Huns under Attila (452). It then passed under the Gothic kings Odoacer and Theodoric the Great, but during the Gothic War it made submission to the Greeks in 540. The city was seized
again by the Goths under Totila, but was restored to the Eastern Empire by Narses in 568.
The history of Padua after Late Antiquity follows the course of
events common to most cities of north-eastern Italy.
Lombard Padua
Under the Lombards the city of Padua rose in revolt (601) against Agilulf, the Lombard
king, and after suffering a long and bloody siege was stormed and burned by him. The Padua of Antiquity was annihilated: the
remains of an amphitheater (the Arena) and some bridge foundations are all that remain of Roman Padua today. The simple
people fled to the hills and returned to eke out a living among the ruins; the ruling class abandoned the city for Laguna,
according to a chronicle. The city did not easily recover from this blow, and Padua was still weak when the Franks succeeded the
Lombards as masters of north Italy.
Frankish Padua
At the Diet
of Aix-la-Chapelle (828), the duchy and march of
Friuli, in which Padua lay, was divided into four counties, one of which took its title from that city.
Rule of the bishops
During the period of episcopal supremacy over the cities of northern Italy Padua does not appear to have been either very
important or very active. The general tendency of its policy throughout the war of investitures was Imperial and not Roman; and
its bishops were, for the most part, Germans.
Emergence of the commune
Under the surface two important movements were taking place. At the beginning of the 11th century the citizens established a constitution, composed of a general council or legislative assembly
and a credenza or executive body, and during the next century they were engaged in wars with Venice and Vicenza for the
right of water-way on the Bacchiglione and the Brenta— so that, on the one hand, the city grew in power and self-reliance,
while, on the other, the great families of Camposampiero, Este and Da Romano began to emerge and to divide the
Paduan district among them. The citizens, in order to protect their liberties, were obliged to elect a podestą, and after a devastating fire in 1174 that required the virtual
rebuilding of the city, their choice fell first on one of the Este family.
The temporary success of the Lombard League helped to strengthen the
towns; but their ineradicable civic jealousy soon reduced them to weakness again, so that in 1236 Frederick II found little difficulty in establishing his
tyrannical vicar Ezzelino da Romano in Padua and the
neighbouring cities, where he practised frightful cruelties on the inhabitants. When Ezzelino was unseated in June 1256 without civilian bloodshed, thanks to Pope Alexander IV, Padua enjoyed a period of rest and prosperity: the
university flourished; the basilica of the saint was begun; the Paduans became masters of Vicenza. But this advance brought them
into dangerous proximity to Can Grande della Scala, lord of Verona, to whom they had to yield in 1311.
As a reward for freeing the city from the Scalas, Jacopo da Carrara was elected lord of Padua in 1318 (query
1338?). From that date till 1405, with the
exception of two years (1388-1390) when Giangaleazzo Visconti held the town, nine members of the
enlightened Carrara family
succeeded one another as lords of the city. It was a long period of restlessness, for the Carraresi were constantly at war; they
were finally extinguished between the growing power of the Visconti and of Venice. Padua prospered economically, and the
university (the second in Italy after Bologna) was founded in 1222, making it one of
the oldest universities in continuous operation. The center of the
university is founded around a rebuilt mediaeval inn of the "Bo" (the Ox) , the mid-16th century Old Courtyard by Andrea Moroni. In the "Room of the Forty" remains the chair of Galileo, who taught in Padua from 1592 to 1610; the Aula Magna, rich with coats of arms and decorations; The
famous Anatomy Theatre, where Vesalius taught through dissections, is the oldest in the world (1594).
The botanical garden was founded in 1545 as the garden of curative herbs attached to the University's faculty of medicine. It is the oldest botanical
garden in the world and still contains an important collection of rare plants.
Under Venetian rule
Padua passed under Venetian rule in 1405, and so remained, with a brief interval during
the wars of the League of Cambray, till the fall of the republic
in 1797. The city was governed by two Venetian nobles, a podestą for civil and a captain
for military affairs; each of these was elected for sixteen months. Under these governors the great and small councils continued
to discharge municipal business and to administer the Paduan law, contained in the statutes of 1276 and 1362. The treasury was managed by two chamberlains; and every five
years the Paduans sent one of their nobles to reside as nuncio in Venice, and to watch
the interests of his native town.
Venice fortified Padua with new walls, built between 1513 and 1544, with a series of monumental gates.
Under Austrian rule
After the fall of the Venetian republic the history of Padua follows the history
of Venice during the periods of French and
Austrian supremacy. The Austrians were unpopular with progressive circles in northern Italy. In Padua, the year of revolutions of 1848 was a student revolt on February 8 that transformed the University and the Caffč Pedrocchi into real
battlefields, in which students and ordinary Padovani fought side by side. In 1866 the
battle of Koniggratz gave Italy the opportunity to shake
off the last of the Austrian yoke, when Padua and the rest of the Veneto became part of
the united Kingdom of Italy.
External link
This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopędia Britannica.
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