La Specola - Padua’s astronomical observatory and museum

Former observatory housed in medieval tower

La Specola - the medieval fortress tower that
became the University's astronomical observatory

The medieval tower known as La Specola, which stands guard over Padua’s Bacchiglione river a short distance south of the city centre, has an interesting history.

Originally part of a 13th century castle known as Castelvecchio, just inside the ancient city walls, the tower became home to the University of Padua’s astronomical observatory in 1767, after which it was in continuous use until the late 1930s, 

The observatory was conceived and designed by Giuseppe Toaldo, a significant figure in the evolution in particular of meteorological science during his lifetime.

Toaldo, who was also an ordained priest, was the university’s chair of astronomy and meteorology for 33 years until his death in Padua in 1797.

His notable achievements included being one of the first scientists to collect and log data and use it to predict weather patterns.

Drawing on his wealth of knowledge of meteorological phenomena, he also saved potentially hundreds of lives by persuading sceptical clergy to attach lightning conductors to the top of church bell towers, which were often struck during electrical storms.

Giuseppe Toaldo, a leading light
in 18th century meteorology

Previously, there was a reluctance to do so because thunderbolts were traditionally seen as expressions of God’s wrath and that to attempt to deflect them was viewed potentially as heresy. Attitudes changed after a lightning strike on a church in Brescia in 1769 triggered an explosion in a gunpowder store that killed 3,000 people.

Working with the architect Domenico Cerato, Toaldo oversaw the creation of the astronomical observatory between 1767 and 1777.

The tower in which it was housed was built in the 13th-century by Padua’s tyrannical then-ruler, Ezzelino III da Romano, who used it as a dungeon where prisoners were tortured. It was raised further in height in the 14th century during a reconstruction by Francesco I da Carrara. 

The tower contained a lower observatory, 16m (52ft) above ground level, and an upper observatory, at a height of 35m (115ft).

In the lower observatory, named the Sala Meridiana; noon was measured on the meridian line sunk in the floor. The upper observatory has large windows almost six metres high. 

A plaque at the entrance carries an inscription by Toaldo that says: "This tower, which once led to infernal shadows now, under the auspices of the Venetians, opens the way to the stars". 

The observatory was superseded by a new facility at Asiago, 75km (47 miles) north of Padua, in 1942.  Since 1994, La Specola has been home to an astronomical museum. As well as displays outlining the history of astronomy in Padua and Europe from the 18th century, the museum offers the chance to see a superb collection of antique astronomical observation equipment, including English-made instruments from the 18th century, and telescopes from Germany and Austria.

Viewing the museum is by guided tour only. Visits take place on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays, at 4pm from October to April or 6pm from May to September, by advance booking. Details can be found here

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Vittorio Vanzo - orchestra conductor

Versatile musician was born in Padua

Vittorio Maria Vanzo, who was passionate about the music of Wagner and introduced many of his works to Italian audiences, was born on 29 April in 1862 in Padua.

Vanzo toured both Italy and abroad as a piano accompanist and conductor and he also composed music himself.

In 1894 he conducted the orchestra of the Teatro Verdi in his home town of Padua during a run of performances of the opera, Edgar, by Giacomo Puccini.

Vanzo’s mother was from a noble family in Padua and his father was a doctor in literature and mathematics. Encouraged by his mother, Vanzo studied piano technique under the pianist and composer Melchiorre Balbi.

He then went to the Conservatory in Milan, where he studied counterpoint with Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti and composition with Antonio Bazzini.

After graduating in 1881, Vanzo became a piano accompanist in the school for singing headed by the baritone, Felice Varesi, and he later performed in concerts throughout Italy and in other countries.

The Teatro Verdi in Padua, where Vanzo 
conducted Puccini's opera, Edgar, in 1894

He is perhaps best known as a conductor and interpreter of the music of the German composer, Wilhelm Richard Wagner. He had become interested in Wagner’s music while studying at the Conservatory in Milan and in order to further his studies of the works of the composer, he went to Bayreuth in northern Bavaria in 1883. There he was able to listen to the music performed in the composer’s own theatre, the Teatro del Festival. Wagner lived in Bayreuth for the last 11 years of his life.

In the same year, Vanzo directed a production of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, which was first staged in Parma on Christmas Day.

In 1891, he married the Norwegian singer, Anna Kriebel, who he had met while he was conducting, and she was performing, at La Scala in Milan. She took part in Wagner’s Lohengrin and Tanhauser, and Vanzo also went on to be her piano accompanist when she performed in Lieder concerts.

Later that year, he conducted the first Italian performance of Wagner’s opera, La Valchiria (The Valkyrie) at the Teatro Regio in Turin, and in 1893 he revived the opera for the Teatro Comunale in Trieste.

Vanzo also conducted Puccini’s Edgar at the Teatro Giglio in Lucca and at the Teatro Regio in Turin.

During his career, Vanzo conducted operas by the Italian composers Catalani, Boito, Leoncavallo, Pergolesi, and many others.

Vanzo's wife, the Norwegian
soprano, Anna Kriebel

He met the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg in Norway in 1897, who had heard his interpretations for orchestra and piano, and Grieg later said he had been impressed with the technical skill and virtuosity of the conductor and composer.

In 1906, Vanzo abandoned his conducting career to devote himself to composition. He composed music for voice with piano accompaniment, chamber music, a sonata for piano and mandolin, and an opera, whose score was never published. He also opened an opera singing school in Milan.

Vanzo and his wife, Anna Kriebel, had three children. Vanzo’s wife died in Milan in 1926, and the conductor and composer also died there himself in 1945.

The Teatro Verdi, where Vanzo conducted the orchestra for a run of an opera by Puccini in 1894, is a beautiful 18th century theatre named after the composer Giuseppe Verdi. It is located in Via del Livello in the centre of the city, close to Piazza dei Signori.

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The tomb of Antenore

Padua’s founder was thought to be a Trojan warrior

A medieval monument believed to house the remains of Antenore, the legendary founder of Padua, stands in Piazza Antenore, close to the University and other famous sights in the centre of the city.

The monument consists of a small Romanesque shrine with a roof, which was built in the 13th century by Lovato dei Loviti, a well-respected humanist and poet, to accommodate an ancient sarcophagus he thought contained what was left of the famous warrior.

This had followed the discovery by him in Padua in 1283 of a skeleton of a warrior inside a coffin in a stone sarcophagus along with a sword and some gold coins.

Loviti believed the remains to be those of Antenore, the Trojan hero credited with founding Padua by the poet Virgil in the Aeneid. He asked for the unearthed sarcophagus to be placed in front of his own house and composed verses in Latin to be inscribed on the stone.

The monument containing Antenore's stone sarcophagus

Antenore was depicted in Greek mythology as a traitor to the Trojans, which is why he had to leave Troy. According to Virgil he fled to Northern Italy and founded the ancient city of Patavium.

Loviti arranged for his own tomb to be placed alongside the monument to Antenore before he died in 1309. However, modern studies of Antenore’s remains have raised doubts about whether they actually belonged to Antenore. It is thought that they may have been the remains of a Hungarian warrior from the ninth century.

Also, some scholars have suggested that the claim Antenore founded Padua may have just been a poetic invention by Virgil.

Piazza Antenore did not exist until 1937, when the square was created after buildings near the monument were demolished to provide a better view of it. Antenore’s tomb is now in front of Palazzo Santo Stefano, which was built in 1811.

The piazza can be found just off Via San Francesco, which is a turning off Riviera Tito Livio, a busy thoroughfare, along which the tram runs between the railway station and the Basilica di Sant’Antonio.

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Gaetano Cozzi – historian and writer

Academic became Padua University professor

Historian Gaetano Cozzi, who became an expert on the statesman Paolo Sarpi and taught at Padua University in the 1960s, was born on 15 September 1922 in Zero Branco in the province of Treviso in the Veneto.

Although confined to a wheelchair for most of his adult life, Cozzi became famous internationally because of his research into the life of Sarpi, and his own writing about the relationship between law and society in Italy.

Cozzi overcame disability to 
become an important academic

Cozzi grew up in Legnano, a municipality of Milan, and went to military school. At the age of 20, he became a second lieutenant in the Alpine troops. While attending a training school in Parma he was kicked by a horse and suffered a leg wound. A vaccine injected into him to treat the wound caused a serious infection and although his condition stabilised after a few months he was left paralysed in his lower limbs.

He had to have frequent periods in hospital, but his medical treatment, rather than demoralising him, stimulated him intellectually. He began to take an interest in politics and came into contact with the Liberal Party in Italy. He contributed to the Resistance in 1943, while lying in his hospital bed, by writing for Italian newspapers that carried propaganda pieces.

Despite being paralysed, Cozzi prepared to take his University exams and he graduated in History of Italian Law at the University of Milan in 1949. His thesis was about the writer Paolo Sarpi, and the relationship between the state and the church in Italy.

Cozzi moved to Venice to continue his research, even though life was difficult for him there because of his disability. After the founding of the Institute for the History of Venetian Society and State, he was appointed its secretary in 1955.

His first book, about Niccoló Contarini, who was the Doge of Venice in 1630, had to be dictated by Cozzi to his mother in 1958 because his illness had once again forced him to lie in bed.

Cozzi was appointed to teach history at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature in Venice and while attending a meeting at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in 1960, he met Luisa Zille, an expert in Philology, who he married in 1962 in Venice. He later collaborated with his wife to edit the Complete Works of Paolo Sarpi.

In 1966, Cozzi was appointed by the prestigious University of Padua to teach Medieval and Modern History at their faculty of Political Sciences.

Casa Cozzi, near Zero Branco, has been
converted into a cultural centre

Cozzi was a prolific writer about criminal justice and prisons in the Venetian republic and he also wrote The History of Venice, published in two volumes in 1986 and 1992.

In 1987, he became a board member of the newly established, Treviso based, Benetton Foundation for Studies and Research.

Cozzi’s writing and research had to be interspersed with long periods in hospital because of complications with his health. He suffered a further blow when his wife, Luisa, who was suffering from depression, took her own life in 1995.

His teaching career came to an end in 1998 with a ceremony at Ca’ Foscari in Venice, where he was awarded the title of Professor Emeritus.

The historian died in 2001 in Venice at the age of 78. He was buried in the cemetery at Zero Branco next to his wife, Luisa. His gravestone bears the inscription: ‘Still together, always together.’

Zero Branco is a municipality in the province of Treviso, located about 37 kilometres (22 miles) northeast of Padua. Casa Luisa e Gaetano Cozzi in Via Milan is now a cultural centre in the countryside outside Zero Branca, having been bequeathed to Fondazione Benetton in Gaetano Cozzi’s will. It is now an eight-hectare complex consisting of a former farmhouse, rustic outbuildings, and agricultural land, which is used by the Benetton Foundation for agricultural research.  

A library houses Cozzi’s documents and archives, which  are made available to scholars. Luisa’s Bechstein piano is preserved there and musical activities take place at Casa Cozzi in her memory.

 

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Church of the Eremitani

Home of Andrea Mantegna’s famous frescoes

Padua's Chiesa degli Eremitani dates
back to the 13th century

Near the Giardino dell’Arena, where you can still see the remains of Padua’s Roman Ampitheatre, stands the Chiesa degli Eremitani, or Church of the Hermits, one of the most important churches in the city in the 14th century.

The Church of the Eremitani was built for Augustinian friars between 1260 and 1276 and dedicated to the Saints Philip and James. The friars remained in the church and adjoining monastery until 1806, when Padua was under Napoleonic rule and the order was suppressed. The Church was reopened for services in 1808 and became a parish church in 1817.

The church has a plain façade and a loggia with a circular rose window above it. Inside, it has a single nave with plain walls decorated with ochre and red bricks and a vaulted wooden ceiling.

It houses the ornate tombs of two lords of Padua, Jacopo II da Carrara and Ubertino da Carrara, which were designed by Andriolo de Santi. The Musei Civici agli Eremitani (Civic Museum) of Padua is now housed in the former Augustinian monastery to the left of the church.

In the Chapel of the Ovetari family, Andrea Mantegna began his artistic career at the age of 17. One of the heaviest losses to Italy’s cultural heritage during World War II occurred in 1944 in Padua when 15th century frescoes painted by Mantegna were blown into thousands of pieces by bombs.

The damage the church suffered in
the air raid was considerable

A raid on the city was carried out by the Allies, hoping to hit Padua’s railway station and a building where the occupying Germans had established their headquarters. But the bombs landed on Padua’s Church of the Eremitani instead, causing devastating damage to the beautiful frescoes created by the young Andrea Mantegna in one of the side chapels.

It was one of the worst blows inflicted on Italy’s art treasures during the war, as Mantegna’s frescoes, which had been painted directly on to the walls of the church, were considered a highly important work.

Andrea Mantegna, who was born near Vicenza in 1431, had been commissioned to paint a cycle of frescoes in the Ovetari Chapel, one of the side chapels in the Church of the Eremitani.

The commission marked the beginning of Mantegna’s artistic career when he started work at the age of 17 in 1448. The artist was in his mid-20s by the time he had finished the cycle in 1457, which showed scenes from the lives of Saint James and Saint Christopher.

Panels on the walls of the chapel
show how the frescoes looked

Tragically, the German invading army had established their headquarters in Padua next to the Church of the Eremitani. When the bombs fell in 1944, the chapel and the wonderful frescoes were severely damaged. They were reduced to more than 88,000 separate pieces, which were later found mixed in with bit of plaster and bricks on the ground.

Fortunately, a detailed photographic survey of the work had been made previously and it was possible later to reconstruct the artist’s designs and recompose part of the cycle depicting the Martyrdom of Saint James. 

Fragments that could be identified have been fixed to panels on the walls of the chapel where the frescoes were originally painted, which gives visitors some idea of how they looked before the church was bombed.

Other frescoes by Mantegna had been removed before the war to protect them from damp, and they remained undamaged and were eventually reinstated in the church.

In other chapels in the Church, 14th century frescoes painted by Guarentio and Giusto de’ Menabuoi miraculously survived.

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Matteo Strukul – bestselling writer from Padua

Author has achieved worldwide fame

Matteo Strukul, born in Padua in 1973, is best
known for his novels about the Medici family

The novelist and journalist Matteo Strukul, whose work has now been published worldwide in many different languages, has just celebrated his 51st birthday. He was born in September 1973 in Padua and he set his first novel in his native region of the Veneto.

Strukul is best known for his four historical novels about the Medici family, which were set in Florence between the 15th and 17th centuries and followed the rise of the house of Medici. They all became best sellers in Italy and have sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide.

The first novel in the series, I Medici, una dinastia al potere, was awarded the Premio Bancarella in 2017. This prestigious award has been won in the past by Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, Umberto Eco, and Ken Follett. The novel was published in English in 2019 under the title Medici Ascendancy.

Matteo Strukul studied law at the University of Padua and went on to study for a PhD in European Contract Law at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

Strukul’s debut novel was a dark thriller set in the Veneto, which was published in 2011 in Italian as La ballata di Mila. The novel was then translated into English and issued in 2014 under the title of The ballad of Mila. Strukul’s novels have now been translated into more than 20 different languages.

Strukul studied law at the University of Padua,
whose main building is the Palazzo Bo (above)

The author is also an adjunct professor of interactive storytelling at Link Campus University in Rome and writes in the cultural section of the weekly magazine Il venerdi di Repubblica.

His latest novel, La crypta di Venezia, was published in April this year (2024).

Strukul has also written Vlad, a comic book trilogy, for the publishers Feltrinelli, based on the historic character of Vlad the Impaler. This was the man who gave Bram Stoker the inspiration for the character of Count Dracula.

Matteo Strukul is the creator and founder of the literary movement Sugarpulp and artistic director of the festival of the same name.

On the Sugarpulp website he says his favourite wine is Raboso del Piave, which is said to be an austere wine with aromas reminiscent of morello cherry, wild blackberry and plum, but also cinnamon, leather, vanilla and pepper

The writer now lives between Padua, Milan, and Berlin.

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Andrea Moroni – architect

Talented designer contributed to the beauty of Padua

Padua's Basilica di Santa Giustina is one of
Andrea Moroni's best known works

Architect Andrea Moroni, who designed many stunning buildings in Padua and the Veneto region, died on 28 April 1560, 536 years ago today, in Padua.  

Moroni was the architect of some acclaimed Renaissance buildings but has tended to be overlooked by architectural historians because his career coincided with that of Andrea Palladio.

Moroni, who spent most of his working life in Padua, made a name for himself with the Benedictine Order and obtained commissions for two Benedictine churches in Padua, Santa Maria di Praglia and the more famous Santa Giustina.

His contract with Santa Giustina was renewed every ten years until his death and he settled down to live in Padua.

He was commissioned by the Venetian Government to build the Palazzo del Podestà, which is now known as Palazzo Moroni in Via VIII Febbraio, and is currently the seat of Padua city council. It is considered one of the most significant Renaissance buildings in the entire Veneto region.

Moroni was also involved in the construction of the Orto Botanico, Padua’s famous botanical gardens, where medicinal plants were grown, and he designed some of the university buildings.

The Orto Botanico, the world's first botanical
gardens, was designed by Moroni

It is known that he supervised the construction of Palazzo del Bo, the main university building in the city, but there is some controversy over who designed the palace’s beautiful internal courtyard. Famous names such as Sansovino and Palladio have been suggested, rather than Moroni, contributing to his talent tending to be overlooked over the centuries.

The Loggia of Palazzo Capitaniato and the 16th century Palazzetto are also attributed to him.

Born into a family of stonecutters, Moroni was the cousin and contemporary of Giovan Battista Moroni, the brilliant painter. They were both born in Albino, a comune to the north east of Bergamo in Lombardy. The architect has works attributed to him in Brescia, another city in Lombardy about 50 kilometres to the south east of Bergamo. He is known to have been in the city between 1527 and 1532, where he built a choir for the monastery of Santa Giulia.

He probably also designed the building in which the nuns could attend mass in the monastery of Santa Giulia and worked on the church of San Faustino before moving to live and work in Padua.

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