Padova

Padova is what happens when 800 years of a major university pile up inside the same brick walls. The Università degli Studi di Padova was founded in 1222 by scholars fleeing Bologna for academic freedom, and counts Galileo (who lectured on physics here 1592–1610), Copernicus, Vesalius (modern anatomy started in the still-extant 1594 Teatro Anatomico inside Palazzo Bo), Elena Cornaro Piscopia (the world's first woman to receive a university doctorate, 1678), and most of the Veneto's medical and legal classes for half a millennium. But Padova's main story is older: in 1303 Enrico Scrovegni commissioned Giotto to fresco the family chapel in atonement for his father's usury, and the result — the Cappella degli Scrovegni — is the single most important fresco cycle in Western art, the work that ended the Byzantine style and made the Renaissance possible. UNESCO inscribed it in 2021 (the cycle had been delayed for decades because the air-handling for the frescoes is so precarious that visits are still timed-entry, 25 people for 15 minutes). The OTHER UNESCO is the Orto Botanico (1545) — the world's first university botanical garden, still on its original walled circular plan, the place Goethe stood when he conceived the idea of the 'Urpflanze'. Beyond the two UNESCOs: Prato della Valle (88,000 m², Italy's largest piazza, with an elliptical canal lined with 78 statues of Padovan worthies), the Basilica di Sant'Antonio (third-largest pilgrimage church in Catholicism — the Saint's tongue is on display), the Palazzo della Ragione with its astrological fresco hall and 200-year-old wooden horse, the Caffè Pedrocchi (open since 1831, neoclassical, the 'caffè without doors' that became the Risorgimento headquarters). The Veneto kitchen: bigoli with duck ragù, baccalà mantecato, risi e bisi in spring, and the famous Padovan asparago bianco IGP at the Mercato di Piazza delle Erbe in May.