How Was Padua Built

The porticoes are the city's defining built feature and the least remarked on. Continuous arcaded walkways along most central streets, they were built up piecemeal from the medieval period onward, and their effect is practical rather than decorative: the historic centre can be crossed almost end to end without getting wet.

The Palazzo della Ragione, begun in 1218, holds one of the largest medieval halls in Europe with no internal columns supporting its roof. The present timber roof, shaped like an inverted ship's hull, was raised over the hall in the early 14th century; the ground floor beneath it has been a covered market for eight hundred years and still is. It is a single building doing civic, judicial and commercial work simultaneously.

The Basilica of St Anthony, built between 1232 and about 1310, is architecturally odd for Italy: eight domes, a pair of minaret-like bell towers, and a plan that borrows openly from Byzantine and even Islamic models, most likely via Venice's own eastern-facing architecture. It reads as a building from somewhere else, which it half is.

Prato della Valle is a piece of deliberate 18th-century civic engineering -- roughly 90,000 square metres, drained by cutting an elliptical canal through what had been marshy ground, and ringed with 78 statues of men connected to the city. It is one of the largest squares in Europe, and it exists because someone decided to make a swamp into a stage.