Padua (Provincia di Padova)
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Padua stands on the Bacchiglione River, 40 km west of Venice and 29 km southeast of Vicenza. The Brenta River, which once ran through the city, still touches the northern districts. Its agricultural setting is the Venetian Plain (Pianura Veneta). To the city's south west lies the Euganaean Hills, praised by Lucan and Martial, Petrarch, Ugo Foscolo, and Shelley.
Padua appears twice in the UNESCO World Heritage List: for its Botanical Garden, the most ancient of the world, and the 14th-century Frescoes, situated in different buildings of the city centre. (An example is the Scrovegni Chapel painted by Giotto at the beginning of 1300.)
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.
Saint Anthony, the patron saint of the city, was a Portuguese Franciscan who spent part of his life in the city and died there in 1231.
The city hosts the famous University of Padua, which was founded in 1222 when a group of students and professors decided to leave the University of Bologna to have more freedom of expression. At the University of Padua, Galileo Galilei was a lecturer between 1592 and 1610.
Padua is the setting for most of the action in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. There is a play by the Irish writer Oscar Wilde entitled The Duchess of Padua.
It is also known as "the city of the three withouts" by its inhabitants as it homes the Cafe without doors (Pedrocchi Café, as it never closed in the past), the meadow without grass (Prato della Valle, in ancient time a bog, now one of the biggest squares in Europe) and the Saint without a name (referred to St. Anthony's Church, called by the Paduani simply "the Saint")
The original significance of the Roman name Patavium (Padoa) is uncertain. It may be connected with Padus, the ancient name of the River Po. Additionally, the Indo-European root pat- may refer to a wide open plain as opposed to nearby hills. (In Latin this root is present in the word patera which means "plate" and the verb patere meaning "to open".) The suffix -av (also found in names of rivers such as Timavus and Tiliaventum) is likely of Venetic origin, precisely indicating the presence of a river, which in the case of Padua is the Brenta. The ending -ium signifies the presence of villages that have united themselves together. According to another theory, Patavium probably derives from Gaulish "padi" which means "pine," in reference to the pine forests thereabouts.
Map - Padua (Provincia di Padova)
Map
Country - Italy
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| Flag of Italy | |
Italy was the native place of many civilizations such as the Italic peoples and the Etruscans, while due to its central geographic location in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, the country has also historically been home to myriad peoples and cultures, who immigrated to the peninsula throughout history. The Latins, native of central Italy, formed the Roman Kingdom in the 8th century BC, which eventually became a republic with a government of the Senate and the People. The Roman Republic initially conquered and assimilated its neighbours on the Italian peninsula, eventually expanding and conquering a large part of Europe, North Africa and Western Asia. By the first century BC, the Roman Empire emerged as the dominant power in the Mediterranean Basin and became a leading cultural, political and religious centre, inaugurating the Pax Romana, a period of more than 200 years during which Italy's law, technology, economy, art, and literature developed.
Currency / Language
| ISO | Currency | Symbol | Significant figures |
|---|---|---|---|
| EUR | Euro | € | 2 |
| ISO | Language |
|---|---|
| CA | Catalan language |
| CO | Corsican language |
| FR | French language |
| DE | German language |
| IT | Italian language |
| SC | Sardinian language |
| SL | Slovene language |
