Loading...After the splendor of Venice & Verona, Padua was a gritty return to reality. Basically, it is an 800 year old college town- like Columbus, OH with better architecture. The day we arrived was some type of graduation. Not sure exactly what level of graduation or who exactly was graduating or why they were graduating in mid-February, but, nevertheless, it was graduation. There were caricatures of graduates pasted up on large sheets of paper all over town. Graduates were seranaded by their nearest and dearest with a song that started “dottore, dottore, dottore” and then degenerated into obscenity. Not sure what type of obscenity, but our tourguide at the Piazza del Bo, the 500 year old university building, assured us it was obscene. The Piazza del Bo was quite interesting- covered in coats of arms from past rectors of the university and their staffs. The practice was discontinued a the end of the 17th century, but the coats of arms still fill the walls- some still vibrant, some barely distinguishable from biege lumps on the walls of the courtyard. Very cool. Also, we saw Galileo’s lectern and the main hall where he taught. Evidently he was given twice his salary and his weight in gold when he was recruited from Pisa by the University of Padova- nice signing bonus. The highlight was the anatomical theatre- three steep galleries in a compact space built around a single dissection table where cadavers were autopsied for instructional purposes. We weren’t able to go up in the galleries since they are so fragile, so we saw it from below- kind of a corpse eye view.
Also saw the Scrovegni chapel, covered in 14th century Giotto frescoes- some of the earliest art of the Renaissance. Scrovegni was a notorious usurer who, in the tradition of David Geffen, Mark Taper and Neil Hellman donated a building to buy his way into heaven. Very impressive from an art history perspective, but didn’t really grab me emotionally- though the huge fresco of the last judgement on the back wall is quite interesting, especially compared with the older version of essentially the same image in the basilica on Torcello, which we had seen earlier in the week.
We bought bread, salami and cheese at the marketplace by the Piazza del Erbe, and ate in the room on plates purchased at “Tutti 99 Cents” along with the Barbera that was on sale in the supermarket. I supplemented this with a plate of “fritto misto”- mixed fried seafood (calamari, clams & anchovies- awesome!) purchased from a cart in the piazza.
Overall, an interesting town, one that would be a lot of fun to go to school or visit friends in- but one that requires more time, energy and, alas, youth than we had at our disposal.
