Padua was Roman Patavium, a Carrarese court city, then Venice's university town for 400 years. This route skips the postcard stops for the baptistery frescoes, the Bo's dissection ring, the walled ghetto and the bastions built after 1509.
Begun in 1232, a year after the friar's death, and finished around 1310: Byzantine domes, Gothic spires and Donatello's bronze high altar of 1443–50. The Treasury Chapel displays the saint's tongue and vocal cords. Open 06:20–19:00.
A Benedictine abbey rebuilt 1521–1587 over a 5th-century martyrium: nine domes, a 122 m nave and the claimed tomb of St Luke the Evangelist. Behind the choir, the Sacello di San Prosdocimo keeps 6th-century Byzantine carving.
The Romanesque baptistery of 1075 was frescoed 1375–78 by Giusto de' Menabuoi: over 100 panels and a dome of Paradise where hundreds of saints ring Christ. Fina Buzzaccarini, wife of Francesco il Vecchio, ordered it as a Carrarese mausoleum.
A 1283 canopy tomb credited to Antenor, Padua's mythical Trojan founder, though the bones inside date to the 3rd century AD. Fifty metres away a viewing well opens onto the Roman Ponte San Lorenzo of 47 BC, buried when the river was diverted.
University seat since 1493. The 1594 anatomical theatre, the oldest surviving anywhere, packed 300 standing students into six oval rings around the dissection slab, and Galileo's wooden lectern still stands nearby. Access by guided tour only.
The Carrarese court square. Its astronomical clock of 1344, rebuilt in 1428 after a fire, tracks the moon and the zodiac but omits Libra entirely, and the Loggia della Gran Guardia of 1532 opposite housed Venice's council of nobles.
Venice converted the keep of the Carrarese castle into an observatory in 1767. You climb 154 steps past the Sala Meridiana to the octagonal room, where 18th-century quadrants stand in the tower once used as the Carraresi prison.
After the imperial siege of 1509, Venice ringed Padua with 11 km of artillery walls and 19 bastions. Alicorno (1523) keeps its cannon galleries and powder store; Falconetto's triumphal Porta Savonarola of 1530 stands a short walk north.
Padua's ghetto was walled in 1603 around Via delle Piazze. The museum occupies the German-rite synagogue of 1682, burned by fascists in 1943, and names the Paduan Jews deported in 1943–44. The Italian-rite synagogue of 1584 still holds services.
Alvise Cornaro's loggia of 1524 and music room of 1530, both by Falconetto, are the first fully classical buildings in the Veneto. Ruzante premiered his peasant comedies on the loggia steps; the Odeo's stuccoes copy Nero's Domus Aurea.
Housed in the 15th-century Ospedale di San Francesco, Padua's first hospital. Vesalius published his 1543 anatomy plates while teaching here, and the galleries run from Morgagni's autopsy records to a talking dissection table.
Padua's Venetian water gate of 1519 was the passenger terminal for Venice: travellers boarded the Burchiello barge here for the seven-hour haul down the Brenta. The 18th-century watchtower still marks the quay steps.