Verona, Vicenza and Padua were the capitals of three of the eight ancient provinces of Venezia.
Padua is built in the midst of a vast plain which merits being called Italian-Flanders. In everything but climate it is like a section of the Low Countries, and the city, with its domes and towers, looms up over the low-lying plain, faint and ghostly from afar, like a mirage of the desert.
Canals and fortress walls enclose the city even to-day, and the nearer one approaches, until one actually sees it from within the walls, the less and less Padua becomes like Italy. The greatest interest of Padua centres undoubtedly in its church of Sant’Antonio, dedicated to the pious companion of Francis of Assisi; after that the University which numbered among its masters Erasmus, Mantius and Galileo, and among its students Dante, Tasso and Petrarch. Padua is intimately associated with the name of Petrarch by reason of his having been a student here. Petrarch died before Chaucer’s time, but the Florentine’s fame had gone afield and from the “Clerk’s Tale” one recalls the following:
“Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk,
Fraunceys Petrark, the laureat poete,
Highte this clerk, whose rethorike sweet
Enlumined al Itaille of poetrye.”
Padua in spite of its low lying situation is monumental at every turn. They had courage, the old builders, to plant great buildings down in the morass, and faith to believe they would last as long as they have.
On Padua’s great Piazzas—there are three of them, one leading out of the other—rise the chief civic buildings of mediæval times. The Loggia del Consiglio is an astonishingly ample Renaissance work of an early period, access to its great hall being by a monumental exterior stairway. An ancient column, with a San Marco lion is immediately in front.