University of Padua

The University of Padua was not founded by a papal or imperial decree: a group of students and teachers left the University of Bologna for Padua with the support of the municipality. The university takes 1222 as its year of foundation because it is the year of the first record of a regular university organization, although study and research there are older.⁠[1]

BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry puts the number of students who seceded from Bologna at about a thousand; like Bologna, the early university was controlled by its students, who elected the professors and fixed their salaries.⁠[2]

The university’s history page attributes the foundation to “a favorable conjuncture of factors”: a massive transfer of teachers and professors from Bologna together with the benevolence and support of the municipality. In his inaugural lecture of 2022 Carlo Fumian called this origin a “diaspora bolognese” and described the university’s public but non-state character as the “primo baluardo” (first bulwark) of its Libertas. The university’s profile page says the Studium Patavinum was founded in Padua in 1222, and Britannica says the university survived the vicissitudes of local despotism.⁠[1][3][3][4][2]

In 1228 a number of students seceded in turn from Padua to Vercelli, but the university survived; further migrations from Bologna followed in 1306 and 1322.⁠[2]

The medieval Studium was organized much like Bologna’s, with scholars’ guilds, colleges of doctors and a chancellor. Students were divided into Transalpine and Cisalpine Nationes, and the rector was elected from the two groups in turn; Britannica states that students were originally grouped into four bodies by geographic origin.⁠[1][2]

The history page explains that the students were divided on an ethnic and geographical criterion, with the Nationes formed inside the two groups, and that the rector was elected by the students and alternated between the groups so that students from all over Europe had a voice. The students paid the teachers through collections and traditionally controlled the statutes, the election of the rector, the choice of teachers and the rotulus, the list of courses offered. Toward the end of the 14th century the Carraresi began to influence these choices through “a sort of policy of chairs.”⁠[1][1]

In the Middle Ages the university was mainly a school of civil and canon law; Britannica states that its faculties of philosophy, law, theology and medicine grew only gradually.⁠[2]

In 1305 the philosopher, physician and astrologer Pietro d’Abano was called to Padua from the Studium of Paris; his successors included Nicolò Santa Sofia and Giacomo and Giovanni Dondi dall’Orologio. The Carraresi lords of Padua attracted famous professors, and Padua stood beside Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge as a leading Western center of culture and research.⁠[1]

The history page says that at the beginning of the 14th century Padua reached the peak of its history as an independent city and professors from all over Europe chose it as a destination; it calls Pietro d’Abano a leading figure of medieval medicine.⁠[1]

In 1399 the students of philosophy and medicine separated from the older Universitas Iuristarum of the law students and formed the Universitas Artistorum, electing the student Benedetto Greco da Salerno as its own rector.⁠[1]

From then on the university consisted of two schools, one for law and one for arts and medicine, which were not reunited under a single administration until the early 19th century.⁠[2]

Padua was ruled by the Republic of Venice from the beginning of the 15th century to the end of the 18th. The students’ influence over the choice of professors was gradually curtailed, and in 1560, after repeated student unrest, the Venetian Senate took the choice of professors away from them entirely.⁠[1]

From the late 15th century the schools scattered across the city were gathered into a single block of buildings, from which Palazzo del Bo developed.⁠[1]

Britannica judges that the university’s greatest distinction came in the 15th and 16th centuries, when it was one of the two or three leading universities of Europe.⁠[2]

The English traveler Thomas Coryat noted in 1608 that there were more foreign students in Padua than in any other university of Christendom.⁠[3]

The history page says that Venice continued the Carraresi practice by financing the appointment of famous professors until repeated student unrest led the Senate in 1560 to take from the students all possibility of choosing professors. It calls the Venetian period, despite some periods of crisis, one of great cultural prestige, and notes that Palazzo Bo is still the university’s central campus.⁠[1][1]

Carlo Fumian’s lecture cites John Herman Randall Jr.’s view that, after Paris in the 13th century and Oxford in the 14th, Padua in the 15th became the center in which ideas from all over Europe were joined into an organized and cumulative body of knowledge. The lecture describes the university’s character as a tension between “tutela” (protection) by and “distanza” (distance) from the power of the Republic of Venice, and says that Padua’s tolerance attracted Jewish, Protestant and Orthodox students, mostly organized in nationes. It also cites John Bury’s statement that Padua was under lay control, Ronald Ohl’s suggestion that its medical community of the mid-15th century may have been the largest in Europe before 1500, and Paula Findlen’s view that Padua was the only university of early modern Europe to claim liberty as its public identity.⁠[3][3][3]

On December 5, 1537, after two days of examinations, Andreas Vesalius received the doctorate of medicine at Padua magna cum laude; the next day he accepted the post of explicator chirurgiae, with responsibility for lecturing on surgery and anatomy, and in 1539 he was reappointed with a considerable increase in salary.⁠[5]

At Padua he began composing De humani corporis fabrica in its final form; he left for Basel in the summer of 1542 to oversee its printing, and the book was published there in 1543.⁠[5]

Gabriele Falloppio and Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente also worked in anatomy at Padua.⁠[1]

A decree of the Senate of the Republic of Venice dated June 29, 1545, established the garden of medicinal plants known as the Hortus Simplicium (Orto dei Semplici), which is still on its original site; a map drawn by Gasparo Abaco in 1568 shows its original circular layout.⁠[6][1]

The university describes it as the world’s first university botanical garden, and Britannica calls it the oldest in Europe. By the end of the 16th century more than 1,000 species were grown there. In 1997 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.⁠[4][2][6]

The description published by the Coimbra Group, written by Antonella Miola of the university’s Department of Biology, calls it the oldest botanical garden in the world, and the university’s history page calls it the first European botanical garden. The description says that medical students learned there to identify plants from living specimens instead of drawings; that because medicinal plants were valuable and open to misuse, a circular wall with gates (the Hortus cinctus) was built against theft and rules for visitors and severe punishments for trespassers were laid down; and that the figure of more than a thousand species at the end of the 16th century comes from Giacomo Antonio Cortusi, Praefectus from 1590 to 1603.⁠[6][1]

The description says that through Venetian trade exotic plants were first grown in the garden and then spread across Europe, among them Syringa vulgaris (1565), Helianthus annuus (1568), Solanum tuberosum and some species of Jasminum (1590) and Rheum rhaponticum (1612). The Praefecti corresponded with European scholars such as Gaspar Bauhin, Mathias de l’Obel, Conrad Gesner, Rembert Dodoens, Jean Brancion of Malines, Carolus Clusius, Joachim Camerarius the Younger, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Giovanni Francesco Séguier and Carl Linnaeus and travelled abroad to study and collect plants, and some foreign students of the Studium Patavinum later became professors and Praefecti. In the 19th century the number of plants rose rapidly to 16,000 specimens; at the time of writing about 6,000 plants were grown.⁠[6]

The old trees listed in the description are the Chamaerops humilis planted in 1568 and mentioned by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (“Goethe’s palm”), now protected by a greenhouse, a Platanus orientalis planted in 1680 and a Ginkgo biloba planted in 1750, which bears both sexes because a female branch was grafted onto the male trunk. The garden lies in the historic center of Padua near the Saint Anthony Basilica and covers 2 hectares; two crossing paths divide the Hortus cinctus into four quarti of 250 flowerbeds each, on a plan that resembles the original one shown in the first illustrated guide of the garden, published by Girolamo Porro in 1591. It has sections for medicinal and aromatic plants, an arboretum, an alpine rock garden, the flora of the Euganean Hills, rare species of north-eastern Italy, Mediterranean maquis, poisonous, insectivorous and aquatic plants, and an orchid glasshouse. The description adds that the university had bought 1.5 hectares south of the garden, where five new greenhouses were then under construction.⁠[6]

The description gives the garden’s main tasks as supplying plant material and horticultural support for research and teaching at the University of Padua and spreading botanical knowledge; a perspective view drawn by Andrea Tosini in 1842 shows the Hortus cinctus and its wall with the Saint Anthony Basilica behind. It also mentions planned educational programs for children, families, visitors, teachers and students, centered on the identification of plants.⁠[6]

In 1592 Galileo Galilei came to Padua to take up the chair of mathematics, and he taught there for 18 years, until 1610; he later called the period “li diciotto anni migliori di tutta la mia età” (the best eighteen years of my whole life).⁠[7][1]

In Padua he was close to Gianfrancesco Sagredo and Paolo Sarpi; a letter to Paolo Sarpi of 1604 contains his formulation of the law of falling bodies. In the same year he began to observe a “stella nova” and lectured on it in public.⁠[7]

With a telescope he had reconstructed himself he made the first detailed observations of the Milky Way, the surface of the Moon and the four main satellites of Jupiter, and in 1610 he published the Sidereus Nuncius. After its publication Grand Duke Cosimo II of Tuscany named him “matematico e filosofo” at a higher salary, and in 1610 he left Padua and settled in Florence.⁠[7][1]

The university’s page on Galileo Galilei’s Paduan years says he was born in Pisa on February 15, 1564, the son of Vincenzo, a member of the minor Florentine nobility who was a composer and music theorist, and of Giulia Ammannati; that he grew up in Florence from the age of 10, began studying mathematics only in 1583, largely on his own, and taught at Pisa from 1589. It calls the Paduan years the most fruitful for his studies: he wrote the texts on which his mature ideas, especially in mechanics, rested, built instruments and developed theories later regarded as revolutionary.⁠[7]

The page says that in 1604 a former employee denounced him to the Paduan Inquisition for insufficient religious zeal, on the grounds of his sale of horoscopes and a relationship outside marriage, and that the complaint went no further. In 1610 he lived in via dei Vignali, now named via Galileo Galilei, and the page thinks it likely that he observed the rings of Saturn that year from the courtyard of his house. The claims of the Sidereus Nuncius were at first contested by academic Aristotelians and traditional astronomers and then gradually accepted, and in Florence he was free of teaching duties. The history page adds that he supported the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus and used a telescope more powerful than those then existing. Carlo Fumian’s lecture recalls that Cesare Cremonini lamented his departure as a matter of leaving “la libertà Patavina.”⁠[7][1][3]

Palazzo del Bo houses a permanent anatomical theatre that the university describes as the first in the world; the university’s history page says it was probably built in 1595, while its profile page says it was inaugurated in 1594. Over its entrance is the inscription “Hic est locus ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae” (this is the place where death delights in helping life).⁠[1][8][4]

After studying arts and medicine at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (1593–1599), William Harvey came to Padua, where he was a student of the Italian anatomist and surgeon Hieronymous Fabricius, and he received his doctorate on April 25, 1602. Britannica calls Padua “the leading European medical school” of the time.⁠[9]

In 1629 Italy’s first university library was established in the Sala dei Giganti.⁠[1]

Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia was born in Venice in 1646, the daughter of the nobleman Giovanni Battista Cornaro, procurator of San Marco, and of the commoner Zanetta Boni. Her father engaged a series of teachers for her, among them Carlo Rinaldini, a professor at the University of Padua, who taught her philosophy.⁠[10]

The university’s account says that she was an illegitimate daughter, the fifth of seven children, and that at 18 she was entered in the golden register of the nobility, her father paying 100,000 ducats to raise her and her brothers to patrician rank. Her other teachers were the theologian Giovanni Battista Fabris, the Latinist Giovanni Valier, the Hellenist Alvise Gradenigo, the professor of theology Felice Rotondi and the rabbi Shemel Aboaf, who taught her Hebrew; she also studied Spanish, French, Arabic and Aramaic, acquired a deep musical culture and studied eloquence, dialectics and philosophy. At nineteen she became a Benedictine oblate, against the wishes of her parents, who wanted her to marry, and she was allowed to live by the Benedictine rule without entering a convent.⁠[10]

In 1677 she applied for a doctorate in theology, which Gregorio Barbarigo, bishop of Padua and chancellor of the university, refused. Through the mediation of Carlo Rinaldini she was instead examined in philosophy, and on June 25, 1678, the Sacred College of Philosophers and Physicians granted her the degree.⁠[10][1]

The account says that the College was inclined to grant her request of 1677, while Gregorio Barbarigo held it “absurd to award a doctorate to a woman,” something that would “make us ridiculous in the eyes of the whole world.” She did all her studying in Venice and moved to Padua only after the degree, living in Palazzo Cornaro near the Santo; her already weak health suffered from study and ascetic mortifications, and she was often ill, sometimes for long periods.⁠[10]

The university describes her as the first woman in the world to receive a university degree and notes that another Italian woman, Laura Bassi, did not graduate until 1732.⁠[10][4]

After graduating she moved to Padua; she died in July 1684 and was buried in the church of Santa Giustina in Padua. In 1773 Caterina Dolfin gave the university a statue of her, which stands at the foot of the Cornaro staircase in the Cortile Antico of Palazzo del Bo; in 2018 the university established the University Centre “Elena Cornaro,” named after her, to promote research and training from a gender perspective.⁠[10]

The account judges that her family treated her as a phenomenon to be displayed, that she herself did not use her gifts to assert the dignity of women, and that her degree was a brief opening that closed again at once; today her statue is also seen as a symbol of women’s emancipation. Carlo Fumian’s lecture says the Paduan degree caused a vast and deep stir and sets it beside cases elsewhere: Anna Maria van Schurman, who in Utrecht in 1636 was allowed to follow lectures from a special niche screened by a curtain but not to graduate, and Laura Bassi, who could take a degree in philosophy at Bologna only fifty years later with the support of Pope Benedict XIV; its notes add, in a quotation from Maria Rosa di Simone, Dorothea Erxleben (printed “Erzleben”), whose doctorate of medicine at Halle in 1754 was the first degree a woman obtained in a professional faculty, Maria Pellegrina Amoretti, who graduated in jurisprudence at Pavia in 1777, and Maria Isidora Quintina Guzman y la Cerda, who obtained a doctorate in philosophy and letters at Alcalá in 1785.⁠[10][3][3]

Reforms in the second half of the 18th century added new chairs and laboratories, and the Astronomical Observatory was built on the tower of the Carraresi Castle; Britannica dates the observatory’s foundation to 1761.⁠[1][2]

Other scholars who taught at Padua under the Republic of Venice were Antonio Vallisneri and Gian Battista Morgagni, and its students included Giuseppe Tartini, Carlo Goldoni and Ugo Foscolo.⁠[1]

The history page specifies that the new chairs were in public law, agricultural science and medicine (medical and surgical clinics, gynecology, pediatrics and occupational medicine), that interest in the experimental method grew, that land was rented for agricultural experiments and that many laboratories were opened.⁠[1]

After Venice fell to the troops of Napoleon BonaparteNapoleon BonaparteNapoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), known as Napoleon I, was a French military leader and statesman who was first consul of the French Republic from 1799 to 1804 and emperor of the French from 1804 to 1814 and again in 1815. In 1803 he sold the Louisiana territory to the United States, and in 1804 he promulgated the French Civil Code.Open the full entry, French and Austrian rule alternated in Padua. The distinction between the two universitates and among the Nationes disappeared, and the rector, now chosen by the viceroy, became the main link between the university and the central government.⁠[1]

From 1813 Austrian rule brought a period of relative stability, but teachers were subject to censorship and strict controls.⁠[1]

The history page calls the period after the fall of Venice one of confusion and instability; under Austria the teachers were appointed by the government, intellectual censorship lowered the level of the courses, and discontent grew among the students. The university’s page on its traditions says the Festa Giustinianea, a day without lectures, is first recorded in 1817, during a general reform of university studies under the Austrian occupation.⁠[1][11]

The university’s list of rectors begins with the establishment of a single rector in 1806; the first name on it is Giuseppe Antonio Bonato, who served in 1806–1807.⁠[12]

On February 7, 1848, more than 5,000 people attended the funeral of a student who had died of natural causes. On February 8 a delegation of leading figures, citizens and students put demands to the Austrian command, which rejected them; clashes followed between Austrian soldiers and the citizens and students of Padua, and the Austrians fired on students who had taken refuge in the Caffè Pedrocchi and the university.⁠[13]

The university’s account says that early in 1848 anti-Habsburg feeling among students and citizens in Padua grew steadily; at the funeral of February 7 the mourners came from all social classes, several hundred young people wore Italian-style dress in defiance of the law and of the Austrian government, and the liveried servants of aristocratic families walked with them. Guerrilla fighting broke out, and the Austrian army “surrendered” (the page puts the word in quotation marks) and withdrew before far more numerous opponents.⁠[13]

Dozens were injured and several people were killed, among them two students, Giovanni Leoni and Giambattista Ricci. The next day 73 students were expelled, many were arrested and four professors were dismissed.⁠[13]

Students later fought alongside the Piedmontese troops in the First War of Italian Independence, and some joined the Expedition of the Thousand. Protests continued until 1866; in 1865 hundreds of students burned copies of Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus in the Cortile Antico.⁠[1][13]

The account calls February 8, 1848, the first insurrection driven by political motives, in which students became the “interpreters and protagonists” of what would become a true season of renewal, and says it preceded the Five Days of Milan and the risings in Paris (February 22–24) and Vienna (March 13). Carlo Fumian’s lecture, following Angelo Ventura, treats the day as the beginning of the university’s tradition of civic commitment and says it opened hostilities against Austria in northern Italy before Milan and Venice. The history page adds that the political movements of those years marked those years and that many Paduan students left their studies to fight alongside the Piedmontese troops, and the university’s page on its traditions notes that the bell of the tower of Palazzo del Bo rang on February 8, 1848.⁠[13][3][1][11]

In 1866 the Veneto was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy, and Giusto Bellavitis became the first rector under the Kingdom, serving from 1866 to 1867.⁠[1][12]

The School of Pharmacy was founded in 1874 and an application school for engineers in 1876.⁠[1]

The history page specifies that the application school for engineers founded in 1876 was independent of the Faculty of Science, that after annexation the University of Padua was placed on the same footing as the other universities of the Kingdom, and that the rector’s mandate became multi-year. Radical expansion and redevelopment of the buildings followed, with the first district devoted to science and a building for the university library. The First World War brought a setback, as many students and teachers left for military service.⁠[1]

Carlo Anti was rector from 1932 to 1943 and oversaw a new wave of building, including the Liviano, the Institute of Physics, the astrophysical observatory at Asiago and the hydrobiological station at Chioggia; the timeline on the university’s history page records under 1942 the building of the largest telescope in Europe.⁠[1][14][12]

The history page says that during the twenty years of Fascism new buildings multiplied — the Institute of Pathological Anatomy, the Surgical Clinic, the institutes along the Piovego, the canteen and the student house — and that the funding obtained under Carlo Anti also paid for radical changes to Palazzo del Bo. The page on Palazzo del Bo says that Gio Ponti supervised the decoration of the rooms reached from the Cortile Nuovo, redefined the spaces of the rectorate and restyled the Aula Magna, and that the rooms contain frescoes and mosaics by Filippo De Pisis, Achille Funi, Ferruccio Ferrazzi and Gino Severini. The page of the university’s museum center adds that the Museum of Archaeological Sciences and Art occupies a building designed by Gio Ponti in the 1930s and that the Museum of Astronomical Instruments at Asiago preserves the historic dome that houses the Galileo telescope.⁠[1][8][15]

In 1942 he commissioned from the painter Gian Giacomo dal Forno 40 portraits of foreign students who had studied at Padua, which the artist completed in tempera on viscose canvas in just over three months in wartime; the floor and table of the Sala dei Quaranta, where the portraits hang, were designed by Gio Ponti.⁠[16]

The economist Marco Fanno, the physicist Bruno Rossi and the anatomist and histologist Tullio Terni were purged because they were Jewish, as were many hundreds of students.⁠[1][14]

The page on the Sala dei Quaranta says that the rector himself chose the persons to be portrayed and supplied the painter with iconographic research, and that where no reliable likeness existed the painter worked from costumes and objects of the period. It calls Gian Giacomo dal Forno a promising artist of Lombard training who worked in wartime amid difficulties in obtaining materials; the forty paintings are arranged in four groups on three walls, recessed into a specially made plinth below. Gio Ponti also furnished the room for the graduation commissions of what was then the Faculty of Political Science.⁠[16]

In 1943 Concetto Marchesi became rector. His speech at the opening of the 1943–1944 academic year, held in November 1943, was taken as a declaration of war by the University of Padua on the oppressors of Italy. The list of rectors shows that Giuseppe Gola succeeded him the same year and served until 1945.⁠[1][3][12]

An article by Daniele Mont D’Arpizio published in 2016 by Il Bo Live, the university’s news site, describes Concetto Marchesi as a Latinist and a known communist and antifascist whom the Badoglio government appointed rector on September 1, 1943, in order to “defascistizzare” the university; after the proclamation of the Italian Social Republic he offered his resignation to the new minister of national education, Carlo Alberto Biggini, who was based in Padua and refused it. The article dates the opening ceremony to November 9, 1943, the start of the university’s 722nd academic year (one later paragraph of the article speaks instead of “quel 9 ottobre mattina,” a Saturday); those present included Egidio Meneghetti, his chief collaborator and later his successor, and Silvio Trentin, a former professor and member of parliament wanted by the police for antifascist activity, while Biggini attended in a personal capacity without having been invited and the blackshirts in the hall were driven out by Marchesi and Meneghetti with the help of the crowd.⁠[17]

The article says that Meneghetti and Trentin laid the ground for the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Regionale Veneto, which met in secret in Palazzo del Bo and from September 25, 1943, published the clandestine newspaper “Fratelli d’Italia”; that the “Appello agli studenti” written by Marchesi followed on December 1 and, with the events of the opening ceremony, is one of the moments that set off the struggle for liberation that followed; and that his term as rector lasted less than two months. Carlo Fumian’s lecture says the ceremony of November 1943 was held in the name not of the king or the Duce but of an Italy “dei lavoratori, degli artisti, degli scienziati”; without naming him in that passage it speaks of the launch of the first appeal to armed struggle against Nazis and Fascists and of a rector who at 64 put a pistol in his pocket, went underground, reached Switzerland and from there kept up contact between the Resistance in the Veneto and the Allies, names Egidio Meneghetti among those who led the Resistance from the university, and calls the gold medal a “caso unico in Italia e forse in Europa.”⁠[17][3]

The same article gives particulars of Marchesi himself: secular from his youth, as a secondary-school student in Catania he founded and circulated the anticlerical newspaper Lucifero, yet liked to withdraw to convents and monasteries to write and rest; he joined the Communist Party in 1921; and he swore loyalty to the Fascist regime, first as a university professor and then on his admission to the Accademia dei Lincei in 1935, a choice the article notes was also made by Calamandrei, Chabod, Einaudi and Jemolo. It relates that he was accused of being the moral instigator of the killing of Giovanni Gentile by GAP partisans because the magazine Rinascita had published an open letter signed by him under the title “Sentenza di morte”; he denied responsibility, saying the text had been altered, and the article says that Emilio Pianezzola’s book Concetto Marchesi. Gli anni della lotta supports this with documents and testimony.⁠[17]

Three members of the faculty, Concetto Marchesi, Egidio Meneghetti and Ezio Franceschini, took part in the partisan Resistance; many of the university’s teachers and students lost their lives in the Second World War.⁠[18][14]

On November 12, 1945, the university was awarded the Gold Medal for Military Valor, the only university in Italy to receive it. Egidio Meneghetti was rector from 1945 to 1947.⁠[1][12]

In 1995, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Liberation, the university installed Jannis Kounellis’s work Resistenza e Liberazione under the arches of the Cortile Nuovo of Palazzo del Bo, dedicated to those three faculty members; made mainly of old wooden planks, it was restored in 2021.⁠[18]

The page on Kounellis’s work says it was first called “Senza Titolo” and later renamed Resistenza e Liberazione; it fills the wall under the arches up to the ceiling, and its old boards were mostly salvaged from abandoned buildings. The commemorative plaque also honors those of the university who united different ideals and cultures in a “concorde lotta di popolo” to win Italy’s freedom. The page explains that the artist meant the work as a homage to Galileo Galilei, whose chair, kept in Palazzo del Bo, the page says was made by students from scrap materials; that the damaged boards heaped in apparent disorder in the lower part recall the destruction of war and that resistance begins as an often individual impulse from the heart that slowly finds echoes and allies around it; and that the more uniform forms of the upper part stand for a peaceful present built on the sacrifices of many. The restoration of 2021 was supported by the Fondazione Alberto Peruzzo for the 800th anniversary. Kounellis’s five preparatory sketches, four in pencil and one in ink with touches of watercolor, are kept in the university’s Archivio Generale; he was born in Piraeus in 1936 and died in Rome in 2017.⁠[18]

The page on Palazzo del Bo says that Arturo Martini made the statue Palinuro in 1947, dedicated to a partisan commander and a symbol of the Resistance, and it lists among the works in the palace a portrait of Egidio Meneghetti by Tono Zancanaro.⁠[8]

Guido Ferro was rector from 1949 to 1968, almost twenty years, a period in which the university expanded and some of its faculties were decentralized to other cities of the Veneto.⁠[1][12]

The postwar decades saw the creation of the Faculties of Psychology, Economics and Statistical Sciences, and of the Agripolis campus to house the new Faculty of Veterinary Medicine.⁠[1]

The history page adds that the rectors who followed Guido Ferro continued to decentralize courses, that the Agripolis campus also gave agriculture more room for experimental work and laboratories, and that a multi-departmental complex for biology, mathematics and psychology was built in the Piovego area.⁠[1]

In 1984 the Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry physicist Chien-Shiung WuChien-Shiung WuChien-Shiung Wu (1912–1997) was a Chinese-born American experimental physicist who spent most of her career at Columbia University and worked on the Manhattan Project. Her cobalt-60 beta-decay experiment of 1956–1957, carried out with collaborators, provided the first experimental proof that parity is not conserved in weak interactions.Open the full entry received an honorary Sc.D. in the Galileo Galilei Aula Magna of the University of Padua.⁠[19]

The timeline on the university’s history page records Italy’s first heart transplant under 1985, the birth of the Galilean school under 2004, and participation in the discovery of gravitational waves under 2015.⁠[1]

A new Statute in force from January 1, 2012, abolished the Faculties, assigned teaching to the departments and allowed Schools to be set up to coordinate courses.⁠[1]

In 2014 the biomedicine complex designed by the architect Mario Botta was completed and the Biodiversity Garden of the botanical garden was inaugurated; in 2015 the student citadel (Studio Valle) was inaugurated.⁠[1]

On October 1, 2021, the installation of the new rector, Daniela Mapelli, was held in the Aula Magna of Palazzo del Bo, where the outgoing rector, Rosario Rizzuto, handed over to her; the ceremony closed with the official opening of the celebrations for the university’s 800th anniversary.⁠[20]

The ceremony of October 1, 2021, opened with greetings from Elisa De Berti, vice-president of the Veneto Region, Sergio Giordani, mayor of Padua, and Raffaele Grassi, the prefect, followed by a speech by the outgoing rector, Rosario Rizzuto; rectors of other universities also spoke — the Sorbonne in Paris, Toulouse-I-Capitole, the University of Bologna and the Università di Napoli — with those of the Universidad de Salamanca and the University of CambridgeUniversity of CambridgeThe University of Cambridge is a university in Cambridge, England, United Kingdom. It gives 1209 as its founding date, is made up of Schools, Faculties, Departments and autonomous Colleges, and is a member of the Russell Group.Open the full entry joining by video link. After the handover Daniela Mapelli gave her first official speech as rector.⁠[20]

On May 19, 2022, in the Aula Magna, Daniela Mapelli proclaimed the opening of the 2021–2022 academic year, the 800th since the foundation. The President of Italy, Sergio Mattarella, attended and spoke at the end of the ceremony; the other speakers were the President of the Senate, Maria Elisabetta Alberti Casellati, the Minister of University and Research, Maria Cristina Messa, the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, and the President of the Student Council, Emma Ruzzon, and Carlo Fumian gave the inaugural lecture.⁠[21]

A procession of Italian and foreign rectors retraced the route of the 1922 procession for the 700th anniversary between the Palazzo della Ragione and Palazzo del Bo. For the 800th anniversary the university restored the Aula Magna and the 40 canvases of the Sala dei Quaranta.⁠[21][8][16]

During the procession of May 19, 2022, the university’s Concentus Musicus Patavinus played and welcomed the rectors into the courtyard of Palazzo del Bo; the anthem written for the anniversary, “Oltre i secoli amica,” with words by Stefano Dal Bianco and music by Federico Gon, was performed by more than 100 choristers and instrumentalists. As Sergio Mattarella entered the Aula Magna the Coro Corollario sang the Italian national anthem and the European anthem. The ceremony was streamed live on the university’s website, and the page also links the university’s official Facebook page and YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel. The university’s page describes the procession as an “ideale abbraccio” between the city of Padua and its university; Carlo Fumian’s lecture was entitled “Sopra ogni altra libertà”: apprendere, parlare e discutere secondo coscienza. By the university’s count the 2023–2024 academic year was the 802nd.⁠[21]

As of November 2026 the university’s website shows Daniela Mapelli as rector for the six-year term 2021–2027; she is a professor in the Department of General Psychology, graduated in experimental psychology at Padua in 1991 and was Vice-Rector for Teaching from 2015 to 2021. The Director General is Alberto Scuttari.⁠[22][23]

The rector’s page adds that Daniela Mapelli obtained a PhD in experimental psychology at the University of Trieste in 1996 and from 2015 to 2021 also chaired the University Presidium for the Quality and Accreditation of Teaching.⁠[23]

As of November 2026 the university’s profile page gives 76,000 students, 2,700 teaching staff, more than 2,800 administrative and technical staff, more than 15,000 graduates a year, 32 departments and 30 libraries holding over 2 million books. Its organization page gives slightly different figures: over 70,000 students, 2,200 professors, over 2,400 staff members, more than 13,000 graduates a year and 29 libraries. Neither page states a reference year for its figures.⁠[4][22]

For the 2026–2027 academic year it offers 114 bachelor’s, 107 master’s and 15 single-cycle master’s degree courses, 64 of them taught in English; for 2025–2026 it lists 43 PhD schools and 67 specialisation schools.⁠[4]

The profile page also lists 11,800 scholarships awarded, gives the degree courses of 2026–2027 as 229 with seven newly introduced ones, and for 2025–2026 counts 127 master’s programmes, 25 advanced courses and 20 higher education courses; it puts the publications of the 2020–2021 academic year at almost 13,000. The organization page gives the number of scholarships as 5,000, and the homepage of the website speaks of “oltre 70.000 studentesse e studenti” in a city of about 210,000 inhabitants.⁠[4][22][24]

A news item published by the university on June 18, 2026, states that in the QS World University Rankings 2027 it placed 204th in the world among 8,808 institutions, 29 places higher than the year before and its best result in that ranking, within the top 14 percent; the edition covered 106 countries and published positions for 1,504 universities. Among the indicators it stood 62nd in the world and 2nd in Italy for International Research Network (up eight places), 115th for academic reputation (up four), 1st in Italy and 122nd in the world for sustainability, 241st for employer reputation (up 100 places) and 266th for Citations per Faculty (up 71). In the news item the rector, Daniela Mapelli, called the result “the sign of shared work” by academic staff, researchers, technical and administrative staff and students and linked it to the quality of research, international collaboration and attention to education, and Mara Thiene, the rector’s delegate for joint degrees and international rankings, said the new position would help the university attract international students.⁠[25]

A news item published by the university on August 15, 2026, states that in the 2026 edition of the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), produced by ShanghaiRanking, it remained among the top 200 universities in the world and ranked 2nd in Italy, one place higher than in 2025; the ranking considers more than 2,500 universities and publishes the first 1,000. On the indicators cited it was 103rd in the world for PUB, which counts the articles published in the previous year and indexed in Web of Science, and 160th for HiCi, which measures highly cited researchers, its score rising from 3.7 in 2025 to 4.2. The university’s ranking page adds that in the Censis ranking for 2026 it came first among Italy’s mega-universities. In the August news item Daniela Mapelli called the result “an important result in a particularly selective ranking strongly focused on research” and described rankings as one perspective among several, useful for comparison with leading institutions and for identifying strengths and areas for investment.⁠[26][27]

Besides the Rector and the Director General, the university bodies listed on its organization page include the Academic Senate, the Board of Directors, the evaluation team, the Council of Department Directors and the Student Council. The Director General, following the guidelines set by the Board of Directors, is responsible for the overall organization and management of services, resources and technical and administrative staff.⁠[22]

Departments have managerial autonomy and carry out research, teaching, training and outreach; Schools coordinate teaching, propose the creation of or changes to degree courses and manage common services; Centers carry out scientific or service activities shared by several structures.⁠[22]

The Galilean School of Higher Education offers courses of excellence in natural sciences, moral sciences and social sciences; students are admitted by a selective test, and those who keep an excellent average receive free room and board and financial support.⁠[22]

The organization page says that the central administration carries out the objectives and programs set by the governing bodies in financial, technical and administrative management and supports the research and teaching of the departments, and that students of the Galilean School may also attend seminars and supplementary courses. Britannica lists the faculties as law, political science, arts and literature, philosophy, education, mathematics, physics and natural sciences, economics and commerce, statistics, pharmacy, agriculture, engineering and medicine, and notes that the Geologic Institute contains a geological museum.⁠[22][2]

The university’s motto is “Universa universis patavina libertas.” In his inaugural lecture of 2022 Carlo Fumian stated that it was created late in the Fascist era and was in all probability coined by Concetto Marchesi at the request of the rector Carlo Anti.⁠[1][3]

The university describes Palazzo del Bo as its historic campus, one of the oldest architectural complexes of the city, made up of several buildings around two main courtyards, of which the Cortile Nuovo dates from the 20th century. The spaces listed on its page also include the Medicine Graduation Hall (Sala di Laurea Medicina) and the works Fulvio Pendini’s “City of Thought” and the frescoes of Casa Capodivacca; the artistic heritage is open to the public on guided tours.⁠[8]

The Cortile Antico of Palazzo del Bo is a 16th-century courtyard whose walls are covered with old coats of arms; the Aula Magna and the anatomical theatre overlook it.⁠[8]

The Sala dei Quaranta, the antechamber of the Aula Magna, takes its name from its portraits of foreign students who attended Padua between the 15th and 19th centuries, among them William Harvey, the French politician Michel de l’Hôspital and Stephen Bathory, later king of Poland; the university’s description notes that doubts remain as to whether the last actually studied at Padua.⁠[16]

On either side of the entrance are Galileo’s chair, which tradition says his pupils built for him, and a three-dimensional copy of his fifth vertebra; the original, given to the university in 1823, is also preserved in the room.⁠[16]

An inscription over the entrance of the Sala dei Quaranta speaks of students who came “from the ends of the earth” to study civil law and the arts; the page adds that they carried home the knowledge gained in Padua. It describes William Harvey as the physician who discovered the circulation of the blood and Michel de l’Hôspital as a French politician famous for his tolerance in matters of religion.⁠[16]

The university’s museum center, the Centro di Ateneo per i Musei (CAM), has its seat in Palazzo Cavalli in Padua and coordinates the activities of the museums; its page says the university has “eleven museums and nineteen collections.”⁠[15]

The museums listed on the page are the Giovanni Poleni Museum of the History of Physics, with instruments from the Renaissance to the present; the Museum of Astronomical Instruments on the Asiago plateau, with instruments in use from the 1940s to the 1980s; the Museum of Nature and Humankind, whose six thematic areas range from the solar system and the Earth’s interior to early life and Homo sapiens; the Botanical Museum, whose herbarium was established in the first half of the 19th century and holds approximately 600,000 samples of dried plants, the oldest from the late 18th century; the Olivi Museum of marine life; the Museum of Veterinary Medicine on the Agripolis campus; the G. B. Morgagni Museum of Human Anatomy, with over 1,500 specimens, whose pathological anatomy section was renovated and opened to the public in 2018; the Museum of Archaeological Sciences and Art, with a plaster cast gallery and the 16th-century collection of Marco Mantova Benavides; the Geography Museum, with three exhibition halls and seven collections; and the Museum of Education, which has a classroom unchanged since 1861.⁠[15]

The museums page of the university’s website calls the Museum of Nature and Humankind the most recently built of them and “the largest university science museum in Europe,” and also lists the contemporary art collection “Eloquent Silences” and the Nina Nasilli Collection of works of art “Luigi Chieco Bianchi.” The museum center’s page says that the university’s cultural and artistic heritage includes, besides its many monumental buildings, Palazzo Bo, Palazzo Cavalli, the Botanical Garden, the 20th-century works of Gio Ponti, the Biodiversity Garden and the renovation of the Beato Pellegrino complex.⁠[28][15]

The university’s page on its traditions says that the opening of the academic year keeps a playful side introduced after the Second World War by the goliardi, the members of the student fraternities, who were once loud enough in the hall to drown out the inaugural lecturer; today, toward the end of the ceremony, they sing Gaudeamus igitur, present the rector with a Paduan hen (gallina padovana) and give the principal guest a joke gift.⁠[11]

The highest rank among the Paduan goliardi is the Tribune, who is now chosen by election on February 8 each year, a date the Tribunate adopted symbolically. The page says that until 1951 the Tribune was taken from third-year medical students who wore a beard and had not yet passed anatomy; before there was a vote, the candidates fought a “battaglia” in the anatomy hall before 11 a.m., amid shoving and brawling, and the one who reached the professor’s chair and was sitting in it when the professor arrived won, until the rector stopped lending the hall and an election took its place. The bell of the tower of Palazzo del Bo now rings for the election of the Tribune and for the rite of the alzabara, and once marked the start of lectures; for a short time it played the first notes of the goliardic song “Vispa Teresa” at noon.⁠[11]

The alzabara is the rite held on the death of a professor, man or woman: the coffin is carried into the Cortile Antico and raised three times by the goliardi while the tower bell tolls; the page notes that in recent years the rite has become more institutional and the goliardi take less part. The Festa Giustinianea is a day on which lectures are suspended and the university is closed, a movable holiday whose date the university bodies choose, often so as to make a long weekend; the page thinks the name probably refers to the thirtieth book of the sixth-century Justinian Code, on legal days and feast days, and says that after 1866 the holiday was not in the academic calendar but was announced a few days ahead at the rector’s discretion, and that since the Second World War the Academic Senate fixes it when approving the next year’s calendar.⁠[11]

The tradition of the osella goes back to 16th-century Venice, where the Doge each year gave game to the nobles of the Maggior Consiglio. In 1990 the rector Mario Bonsembiante reinterpreted the ceremony as the Christmas greetings at Palazzo del Bo; year after year the university community has since seen a series of medals, the oselle, come into being — “frammenti di memoria” (fragments of memory) celebrating the people, discoveries and key moments of the Patavina libertas.⁠[11]

The university’s address is Via 8 Febbraio 2, Padua. Beyond Padua it has teaching and research sites in the Veneto and elsewhere, and entire degree courses are taught in Legnaro, Rovigo, Treviso, Venice, Vicenza and other places.⁠[29][4]

The sites listed on the page also include Asiago (the Astrophysical Observatory), Bressanone (summer courses), Castelfranco Veneto (Villa Parco Revedin Bolasco), Spert (the pole of Higher Mountain Education), and Bolzano, Chioggia, Conegliano, Feltre, Monselice, Portogruaro, San Vito di Cadore and Schio.⁠[29]

The notable alumni listed by Britannica also include Eugenius Bulgaris, Alexander VIII and Vincenzo Dandolo.⁠[2]

Britannica’s list also has Andreas Vesalius. The figures named on the university’s profile page as linked with it are Copernico, Vesalio, Galilei, Harvey, Tullio Levi-Civita, Concetto Marchesi and Bepi Colombo. Carlo Fumian’s lecture names Harvey, Vesalius and Galileo together as the men who revolutionized medicine and astronomy at Padua.⁠[2][4][3]

University of Padua: Official website: https://www.unipd.it/ (opens in a new window).⁠[24]

X: Public account: https://x.com/UniPadova (opens in a new window).⁠[1]