Padua historical timeline

Origins

Roman Patavium was among the wealthiest cities of northern Italy, grown rich on wool and river trade, and large enough to build the amphitheatre whose remains still sit beside the Scrovegni Chapel. Local legend gives it an older founder still, the Trojan Antenor, whose supposed tomb stands in the centre -- a medieval identification of a much later sarcophagus, and a good illustration of how seriously the city took its own antiquity.

Turning points

In 1222 a group of scholars left Bologna over disputes about academic freedom and founded a university here. It became the defining institution of the city: Padua's identity as a place of argument and enquiry dates from that year and has never really lapsed. The 14th century brought the Carraresi family to power and, with them, the commissions that produced the fresco cycles the city is now known for.

Influential people

Giotto painted the Scrovegni Chapel between about 1303 and 1305, and in doing so changed what European painting was for -- figures with weight, space with depth, faces with recognisable emotion. Nearly three centuries later Galileo Galilei held the chair of mathematics from 1592 to 1610, formulating much of his work on motion here. Andreas Vesalius taught anatomy in the same university, publishing the book that founded modern anatomy in 1543.

Cultural evolution

Venice took Padua in 1405 and held it until the Republic itself fell in 1797. Venetian rule ended the city's independence but protected its university, which the Republic used as its own -- a deliberate policy that kept Padua intellectually significant long after it stopped being politically so. Austrian rule followed, then unification with Italy in 1866.

Present-day significance

The Second World War damaged the city badly; a 1944 raid destroyed most of Mantegna's frescoes in the Eremitani church, one of the heaviest single losses of Italian Renaissance painting. What survived, above all Giotto's chapel, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2021 as Padua's fourteenth-century fresco cycles, spread across eight separate buildings -- a listing for a body of work rather than a single monument.