Padua Culture

The university is the single largest fact of Paduan cultural life. Founded in 1222 and now teaching around sixty thousand students, it gives the city a permanent young population and an intellectual self-image that predates almost every other institution here. Graduation days are public events: the laurea is celebrated in the streets with a laurel crown, a large poster of the graduate, and a chanted song of considerable rudeness -- entirely normal, and startling if you don't know what you are watching.

Devotion to St Anthony runs in parallel and barely intersects. The basilica draws pilgrims year-round, peaking on 13 June, and the surrounding streets support an economy of religious goods that has existed for centuries. The two Paduas -- secular, argumentative, student -- and devotional, quiet, ancient -- share the same square kilometre without much friction.

Then there is the aperitivo. The spritz is a Veneto institution and Padua drinks it in volume, standing up, in Piazza delle Erbe and Piazza dei Frutti from about six. Caffè Pedrocchi, opened in 1831, was famously the caffè senza porte, the café without doors, kept open day and night so anyone could sit without ordering -- a piece of civic self-definition that still shapes how the city thinks of its public spaces.