Bo Palace, Padua

The palace is organized around two principal courtyards that mark its historical layers. The older core centers on a cloister-like courtyard formed by a two-level covered gallery, built around the middle of the sixteenth century, which opens onto the series of lecture rooms. The new wing, created in the twentieth century, frames a modern courtyard with large reliefs and rooms for student assemblies. Construction throughout blends medieval timber and masonry with later stone dressings and twentieth-century travertine and Orsera stone.

The older courtyard presents a two-level colonnade with a classical order on each storey, Doric columns below and Ionic above, a sequence begun in the mid-1500s. The arcades and adjoining spaces are covered with a very large collection of painted and carved coats of arms, numbering about three thousand, executed first in paint and later carved in stone after about 1590. The stone flagging and colonnade surfaces are trachyte; these surfaces, together with decorative plasters and carved stone elements, were consolidated and cleaned in a conservation campaign completed in 2013.

The Anatomical Theatre is a wooden, inverted-cone structure laid out on an elliptical plan, with six concentric tiers of stepped seating rising around a central dissection table. Its balustrades are carved walnut. Originally its windows were blind and lessons were illuminated by candles and torches until the blind openings were opened in 1844. A small adjacent room that once served as the theatre’s service or preparation space now houses a small permanent exhibition. The theatre remained in active use for teaching until 1872, was modified in the nineteenth century, and underwent restoration near the end of the twentieth century.

The principal assembly hall evolved in the nineteenth century when its ceiling was raised by about five meters and fresco decoration was added. Mid-twentieth-century interventions reorganized the south wall, including the display of the university motto UNIVERSA UNIVERSIS PATAVINA LIBERTAS, and changed seating arrangements and the arrangement of heraldic shields. An ante-room to this hall, the so-called Hall of the Forty, is decorated with forty tempera portraits painted in 1942 and contains a restored wooden chair associated with Galileo; the wood of that chair has been analysed and confirmed as ancient.

Rooms used by the medical faculty preserve older fabric. The medicine hall, reached from the upper gallery of the old courtyard, retains a medieval wooden ceiling and fragments of a medieval frieze. A large fresco dating from the 1940s decorates the southern wall with studies of human anatomy. The chamber holds two large horseshoe-shaped wooden tables and a display case that contains the skulls of seven professors who donated their bodies to research.

The modern courtyard and the adjoining wing reflect the twentieth-century enlargement and decorative program. The new courtyard shows a large high-relief carved in travertine (1939) and a later relief representing Minerva and Victory dated 1942, and it contains rooms named for male and female students used for assemblies. The modern court displays twentieth-century sculptures and frescoes, including a contemporary installation associated with resistance and liberation themes.

Access and monumental stairways link these levels. The approach to the Rector’s Gallery ascends from the main atrium through a monumental bronze door cast in 1922 from captured war cannon, bearing the names of students who fell in World War I. The stair, frescoed and decorated in the mid-twentieth century, is flanked by sculptural works including a figure named Palinuro. The complex therefore preserves architectural layers from the university’s medieval beginnings through Renaissance remodelling, important early modern interiors for teaching, and a coherent series of twentieth-century additions and restorations.