The history of Padua

Sixteen brass stones name the deported of this street

You are standing on Via Otto Febbraio, a few steps from where sixteen small brass squares are set into the pavement of this neighborhood. Each one carries a name, a birth year, and a date of arrest. Almost every one ends the same way: Auschwitz. The stone under your feet marks Marcello Levi Minzi, arrested here on February 4, 1944, and killed at Auschwitz that August. A few doors on, the Gesess family — Ada, Elia, and a child named Sara — were taken together in December 1943. Sara was six years old.

This cluster of names sits at the edge of what was once Padua's Jewish ghetto, sealed by Venetian decree in the 16th century and only opened up in the 1800s. Just eighty metres from here stands the Padua Synagogue, finished in 1548 and still the working heart of the Jewish community it has served through four centuries — plague, occupation, and the roundups of 1943 and 1944 that these stones remember. The Museo della Padova Ebraica sits almost on top of it, telling the longer version of the story these pavement markers interrupt.

Widen the view a little and the ground carries other weight too. The University of Padua, one of the oldest in the world, has taught here since 1222, and its lecture halls and courtyards lie a short walk north. But on this particular street, in this particular decade, the history that matters most is smaller and closer: doorways, names, and the people who once lived behind them.

Bombs fell four days after an arrest nearby

On February 8, 1944, Allied bombers hit Padua hard. The date fell on the anniversary of the 1848 student uprising against Austrian rule, and it gave the street its name — Via Otto Febbraio, "Eighth of February Street." The bombing killed civilians across the central districts, the raid landing just four days after Marcello Levi Minzi was pulled from his home a short walk from here. War arrived at this corner twice that year, once in daylight raids from the sky, once at a door in the night.

More names lie close by, each a stumbling stone set into the pavement outside a former home. The Coen Sacerdoti couple, Amalia and Eugenio, were taken in May 1944. Oscar Coen and Gemma Bassani went in the roundup of December 1943, the same sweep that caught the Gesess family. A little further off, at the university buildings to the north, stones mark students and teachers taken from lecture halls rather than apartments: Augusto Levi, a teacher arrested in January 1944, and students Paolo Tolentino, Giuseppe Kroò, and Giorgio Arany, all deported, all lost. The stones use three different verbs — lived here, taught here, studied here — and together they trace how completely the roundups reached into this small patch of the city.

A failed siege kept Padua under Venetian rule

A few streets over, Padua once withstood a siege. In 1509, during the War of the League of Cambrai, an imperial siege tried to take the city back for the Holy Roman Empire and failed, a defeat that helped keep Padua under Venetian rule for another three centuries — the same Venetian rule that would later wall off the ghetto you are standing beside.

North of here, the University of Padua's old buildings hold quieter history. The Anatomical Theatre inside the Palazzo del Bo, finished in 1595, was the first permanent theater built anywhere for public dissection, and doctors across Europe copied its design for a century after. Its Rectorate, Bo Palace, has run the university since 1493.

Closer still, the Ponte San Lorenzo crosses what was once the river Bacchiglione, built by Roman engineers sometime between 47 and 30 BC. It is buried under the modern street now, one of the earliest arched bridges of its kind anywhere in the world, hidden beneath pavement much like the stumbling stones are set into it a few blocks south.

A market hall still divides two city squares

Padua's civic heart sits a short walk northwest: the Palazzo della Ragione, a 13th-century market hall and courthouse, still divides the two market squares of Piazza delle Erbe and Piazza della Frutta. Nearby, the Palazzo dei Signori holds its 15th-century astronomical clock tower, and the Padua Cathedral traces its first construction back to the 4th century, though the building standing today is mostly the product of later rebuilding.

Caffè Pedrocchi, built in 1831, became a stage for the 1848 uprising against Austrian rule — the same uprising Via Otto Febbraio's name later commemorated. Byron and Stendhal both drank there.

Under all of it, the ground itself is Pliocene clay, laid down millions of years ago beneath what was once open sea. It gives Padua's older buildings their reddish brick and its plain its flatness, the low, wide delta country that the city has always sat on.