Padova City of Science is the route that unites, in an extraordinary adventure of knowledge and discovery, the world’s oldest university botanical garden, Palazzo Bo with its first permanent anatomical theatre in history, and the natural science narrative of the Museum of the Nature of Humankind.

It is possible to purchase a single ticket to visit the Museum, the Botanical Garden and Palazzo del Bo at the weekend, which also grants entry to the university museums participating in the “Domenica al museo” initiative.

For those who prefer to visit part of the pathway, it is also possible to purchase the ‘integrated 2-sites ticket’, choosing which of the 3 to visit.

Over the centuries, Padua has been the cradle of many sciences. As early as the late Middle Ages, a professor at the University of Padua, Pietro D’Abano, combined medicine, alchemy, philosophy, mathematics and astrology, in his commentary on Dioscorides. In the Renaissance, some of the greatest doctors and anatomists of all time studied or worked in Padua, such as Realdo Colombo, Gabriele Phallus and Andrea Vesalius, who in 1543 revolutionised modern anatomy with De humani corporis fabrica, whose splendid illustrations changed the way the human body was studied.

In 1545 the University of Padua founded the Orto dei Semplici, and in 1595, when Fabrici d’Acquapendente was a professor there, the first permanent anatomical theatre in the world was inaugurated at Palazzo del Bo. This is a dark, elliptical space with six carved walnut stands from which to observe anatomical dissections live. In the early seventeenth century, the Englishman William Harvey arrived in Padua to study medicine at the school of d’Acquapendente. After returning home, in 1628 Harvey introduced the revolutionary theory of blood circulation and the central role of the heart. But Padua is also the university of Galileo, who taught there for eighteen long years – which he called the best of his life – from 1592 to 1610, the year he published one of his most important texts, the Sidereus Nuncius. In it he announced to the world, in a text and images he provided, the extraordinary discoveries resulting from direct observation of the sky using the telescope, from the irregular surface of the Moon to the satellites of Jupiter. In the eighteenth century, Giovanni Battista Morgagni, professor of medicine in Padua, published De sedibus et causis morborum (1761). Through the anatomical study of corpses, Morgagni revealed the causes of disease and the effects on human organs. Thus was modern anatomic pathology born in Padua. In the same years, physicist Giovanni Poleni for the first time offered lectures of physics based on experiments and demonstrations using state-of-the-art equipment, in a Physics Cabinet recognised at the time as being one of the most prestigious in Europe. In the naturalistic field, the physician Antonio Vallisneri senior, a professor in Padua since 1700, devoted himself to the experimental study of insects and other natural phenomena. Upon his death, the son donated his father’s rich natural history collection to the University of Padua, which thus inaugurated the teaching of natural history. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the zoologist Giovanni Canestrini made Padua a centre for the dissemination of Darwin’s theory of evolution, while In the twentieth century, the great tradition of physics continued with the school of Bruno Rossi, the father of cosmic ray physics, and Massimilla Baldo Ceolin, one of the first women in Italy to obtain a chair in physics at a university.

Many of these collections and places can still be visited today, from the Museo della Natura e dell’Uomo (Museum of Nature and Mankind) at Palazzo Bo to the Museo Poleni.

Contact: tour@unipd.it

Opened in June 2023, the Museum of Nature and Humankind presents a scientific narrative about planet Earth as an evolving system, about diversity and the relationship between humanity and the environment, with an engaging, multimedia and interactive layout. Born from the fusion of the extremely rich naturalistic collections built up over centuries by scholars and explorers at the University of Padua for research and teaching purposes, the new exhibition brings together the pre-existing university museums of Mineralogy, Geology and Palaeontology, Anthropology and Zoology with their 200,000 natural items and anthropological artefacts. The permanent exhibition is divided into 38 rooms with a total area of approximately 3,800 square metres. It is spread over three floors and features 3,500 historical exhibits, 25 tactile models dedicated to the exploration of zoology and 89 multimedia and interactive exhibits.

The itinerary enables visitors to explore an authentic fossil forest – the Palm tree Hall – to learn about the evolution of plants and the climate changes that have taken place over the last 400 million years. It displays a unique specimen in Italy of the sabre-toothed tiger (Smilodon fatalis), an authentic icon of the Ice Age. It deepens our knowledge of the animal world, of evolutionary mechanisms and the causes of threats to biodiversity, immersed in a virtual marine environment or surrounded by historical specimens of large and small or, indeed, tiny terrestrial animals. It tells the story of man’s time on Earth, from origins to the voyages of exploration and discovery of the populations of Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania with original exhibits from different eras and cultures.

Contact: prenotazioni@visitmnu.it