Overview
Padua is known as “La Dotta” (The Learned) — its university, founded in 1221, is the second oldest in Italy after Bologna, and still thrives today, with a large Italian and foreign student population. For Catholic visitors, however, the main reason to come to Padua is to see the tomb and relics of St Anthony in the flamboyant, onion-domed church dedicated to him and situated on the south side of the old city centre.
At the time of the Roman Empire, Patavium, as Padua was then called, was, with Verona, one of the wealthiest cities in Venetia, earning its money from trading in the agricultural produce which grew so well on the rich alluvial plains around the city. At the time of Augustus, the first of the Emperors, Patavium also produced one of the most famous Roman historians ever — Livy (65 BC – 12 AD), who wrote the first History of Rome.
From the 11th to the 13th centuries, Padua was an independent city state. It was a very important period for the city intellectually and spiritually — the first scholars settled themselves at the new university, and following St Anthony’s death, the first pilgrims began to flock to his tomb in hope of intercession and miracles. The university, established in 1221, became known especially for its School of Medicine and its scientific studies. Galileo Galilei came up from Tuscany to lecture here in the early seventeenth century, from the pulpit of the university’s Great Hall, and spoke of his revolutionary, and, to the Catholic Church, unpalatable, theories. William Harvey, an Englishman who discovered that blood circulated round the body, studied at Padua under a tutor called Fabricius, whose circular anatomical theatre built in 1594 is still in existence (though not visitable at present).
In 1337, Padua ceased to be an autonomous state, and became, like Verona, a city governed by ruling lords — in this case, the Carrara family. However, Padua was a small city, and dangerously close to big, powerful Venice, which in 1405, hungry for more inland territories to add to its Empire, made a foray, and captured Padua and Verona in the same year, ousting the Carraras from their position of benign despotism. Padua was thus part of the Venetian Republic for almost 400 years. The Brenta Canal, running back from Padua to Venice, provided Venetian noblemen with a delightfully tranquil and airy site for their summer villas — over seventy were built along the Canal. They were isolated enough to provide respite from the heat, crowds and smell of Venice in summer, and yet ideally close enough to enable their owners to hurry back to the council chambers of the Doge’s Palace if a sudden state meeting was called. Many were designed by Palladio in the sixteenth century, and their symmetrical, classical facades give onto exquisite interiors inventively decorated by the likes of Veronese and Tiepolo. Shakespeare’s imagination, too, was touched by these summer palaces and the old university city nearby — Portia, in The Merchant of Venice, leaves her Brenta Canal villa, Belmont, to go and save Antonio’s pound of flesh, and The Taming of the Shrew is set in Padua.
Saint Anthony and His Basilica
Around the same time as the birth of the university, the saint who received the speediest ever canonisation was making a name for himself as a preacher and follower of St Francis. St Anthony was originally Portuguese, and was born in Lisbon, the son of a wealthy family. He showed such a love of the Scriptures, and such aptitude for reciting fervently from them, that by the age of 15, his family gave in to his pleading and installed him in a monastery in the mountains outside the city.
A few years later, some Franciscan friars making their way across Europe preaching the word of St Francis, stopped at Anthony’s monastery, and impressed him deeply with their simple dedication to God. They soon went on their way, this time to northern Africa, where their preaching resulted unfortunately not in conversions, but in their gruesome deaths. Their bodies were shipped back to Portugal, where they were buried in Anthony’s monastery.
Anthony now saw the light, took Franciscan orders, and set sail for Africa himself, to carry on where the friars had sadly been obliged to leave off. However, much to his chagrin, his preaching there was soon interrupted by a terrible attack of malaria, and he could do no more than lie on his bed and wish for Portugal. He left in a ship bound for Lisbon, but it was blown off course in a violent storm, and shipwrecked off Sicily.
This proved to be a fortuitous accident, placing Anthony in the homeland of the leader of his Order. As he journeyed up Italy towards Assisi, he heard many wondrous accounts of St Francis’s inspiring preaching, and longed to help. One day, some preachers due to give an important sermon at the monastery outside Assisi failed to turn up. Anthony was called upon, and spoke on one of St Francis’s three precepts for living — Obedience. The sermon was a huge success, and soon Anthony was filling piazzas and fields all over Italy. St Francis made him official Franciscan Preacher to All of Italy, and miracles began to occur.
Anthony died outside Padua in 1232. He was canonised less than a year later, and the Basilica di Sant’Antonio — “Il Santo” — was begun. The building is extraordinary, with domes, campanili and a great conical cupola. Inside, the Treasury contains relics housed in crystal cases: his tongue (blackened with age), his larynx, and his jawbone. Further round the Basilica in St Anthony’s Chapel is his tomb, surrounded by ex-votos thanking him for finding lost people and objects — he is the patron saint of lost things.
The High Altar is by Donatello, as is the bronze equestrian statue outside, representing the condottiere Erasmo di Nardi (Gattamelata), who fought for Venice and died in Padua in 1443.
The Scrovegni (Arena) Chapel
This small chapel, frescoed by Giotto at the beginning of the fourteenth century, is the main attraction of Padua for art lovers. It is not included on most itineraries, but your group may have it on a special program or may request it specifically. It is located in the gardens of the old Roman arena near the railway station.
The chapel was built by Enrico Scrovegni in 1303. His father had amassed a large fortune through usury, and Dante placed him in Hell in the Inferno. Enrico, hoping to atone, commissioned Giotto to decorate the chapel. Between 1305 and 1310, Giotto painted 38 scenes from the lives of the Virgin and Christ, full of drama, narrative clarity, and his revolutionary understanding of spatial realism. Below these biblical scenes are allegories of the Virtues and Vices, painted to look like marble carvings — a clever, inexpensive trompe-l’oeil. The west wall shows an enormous Last Judgement, complete with tormented sinners and fiery demons.
Enrico clearly hoped the lavish decoration of the chapel would help secure his soul’s fate more mercifully than Dante had predicted.