Palazzo Bo Site Features

The core is a 16th-century courtyard ringed by a double loggia, its walls and ceilings covered with the painted coats of arms of former rectors and students -- thousands of them, applied over centuries, and the most immediately striking thing in the building.

The anatomical theatre of 1594 is a tight elliptical well of six concentric wooden galleries, standing room only, rising almost vertically around a small table. Its steepness is functional: everyone had to see downward onto the same point.

Gio Ponti's 1930s work added the Aula Magna's fittings, staircases and murals in a stripped, confident modern idiom that sits beside the Renaissance fabric without imitating it.

The anatomical theatre

1594, the oldest surviving of its kind. Small, steep and startling.

Galileo's lectern

The desk he is said to have taught from, kept in the Aula Magna.

The wall of coats of arms

Centuries of rectors' and students' heraldry painted over every available surface of the old courtyard.

Cornaro Piscopia's statue

A memorial to the first woman in the world to be awarded a university degree, in 1678.

The palazzo sits in the middle of Padua's centre on Via VIII Febbraio, directly opposite Caffè Pedrocchi and a minute from the market squares. The street is one of the busiest pedestrian routes in the city, and the building's frontage is easy to miss among the shops.