Lorie

Best Of (4 April 2005). The simple people fled to the hills and returned to eke out a living among the ruins; the ruling class abandoned the city for Laguna, according to a chronicle. Week End Tour (4 October 2004). The Padua of Antiquity was annihilated: the remains of an amphitheater (the Arena) and some bridge foundations are all that remain of Roman Padua today. Attitudes (19 January 2004). Under the Lombards the city of Padua rose in revolt (601) against Agilulf, the Lombard king, and after suffering a long and bloody siege was stormed and burned by him. Live Tour (25 August 2003). The history of Padua after Late Antiquity follows the course of events common to most cities of north-eastern Italy.

Tendrement (16 September 2002). The city was seized again by the Goths under Totila, but was restored to the Eastern Empire by Narses in 568. Près de Toi (30 September 2001). It then passed under the Gothic kings Odoacer and Theodoric the Great, but during the Gothic War it made submission to the Greeks in 540. Padua, in common with north-eastern Italy, suffered severely from the invasion of the Huns under Attila (452). Abano nearby is the birthplace of the historian Livy, and Padua was the native place of Valerius Flaccus, Asconius Pedianus and Thrasea Paetus.

Its men fought for the Romans at Cannae, and the city (a Roman municipium since 45 BC (query 43?)) became so powerful that it was reported able to raise two hundred thousand fighting men. The historical Padua inhabited by (Adriatic) Veneti thrived thanks to its excellent breed of horses and the wool of its sheep. Padua claims to be the oldest city in north Italy; the early medieval commune justified itself by a fabled founder in the Trojan Antenor, whose relics the commune recognized in a large stone sarcophagus exhumed in the year 1274. The trade of the district has grown to such an extent that Padua has become the central market for the whole of Veneto.

Corn and saw mills, distilleries, chemical factories, breweries, candle-works, ink-works, foundries, agricultural machine and automobile works, have been established and are flourishing. The industry of Padua has greatly developed in modern times. . Padua is the setting for most of the action in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.

The city is picturesque, with a dense network of arcaded streets opening into large communal piazze, and many bridges crossing the various branches of the Bacchiglione, which once surrounded the ancient walls like a moat. Its agricultural setting is the Pianura Padovana, the "Paduan plain," edged by the Euganaean Hills praised by Lucan and Martial, Petrarch and Ugo Foscolo. The city is included, with Venice (Italian Venezia), in the Padua-Venice Metropolitan Area, population 1,600,000. The capital of Padova province, it stands on the Bacchiglione River, 40km west of Venice and 29km southeast of Vicenza, with a population of 211,985 (2004).

Patavium) is the economic and communications hub of the Veneto region in northern Italy. Padova IPA ['padova], Lat. The city of Padua (It. This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, a publication in the public domain..

Close by the Eremitani, in the site of an old Roman arena, is the small Scrovegni Chapel whose inner walls are entirely covered with paintings by Giotto. The old monastry of the church now houses the municipal art gallery. The Church of the Eremitani is an Augustinian church of the 13th century, distinguished as containing the tombs of Jacopo (1324) and Ubertino (1345) da Carrara, lords of Padua, and for the chapel of SS James and Christopher, formerly illustrated by Mantegna's frescoes, largely destroyed by the Allies in World War II, because it was housing a German headquarter. One of the best known symbols of Padua is the "Prato della Valle", a 90.000 sq meters elliptical square believed to be the biggest in Europe, after Red Square in Moscow.

On the piazza in front of the church is Donatello's magnificent equestrian statue of "Gattamelata" (Erasmo da Narni), the Venetian general (1438-1441), which was cast in 1453, the first full-size equestrian bronze cast since antiquity; it was inspired by the Marcus Aurelius equestrian sculpture at the Capitoline Hill in Rome. The bones of the saint rest in a chapel richly ornamented with carved marbles, the work of various artists, among them of Sansovino and Falconetto; the basilica was begun about the year 1230 and completed in the following century; tradition says that the building was designed by Nicola Pisano; it is covered by seven cupolas, two of them pyramidal. The most famous of the Paduan churches is the basilica dedicated to Saint Anthony of Padua, locally simply called "Il Santo". Falconetto was the architect of Alvise Cornaro's garden loggia, (Loggia Cornaro), the first fully Renaissance building in Padua [1].

In the Piazza dei Signori is the beautiful loggia called the Gran Guardia, (1493 - 1526), and close by is the Palazzo del Capitanio, the residence of the Venetian governors, with its great door, the work of Giovanni Maria Falconetto, the Veronese architect-sculptor who introduced Renaissance architecture to Padua and who completed the door in 1532. The new space was refrescoed by Nicolo' Miretto and Stefano da Ferrara, working from 1425 to 1440. The Palazzo was begun in 1172 and finished in 1219; in 1306 Fra Giovanni, an Augustinian friar, covered the whole with one roof; originally there were three roofs, spanning the three chambers into which the hall was at first divided; the internal partition walls remained till the fire of 1420, when the Venetian architects who undertook the restoration removed them, throwing all three spaces into one and forming the present great hall, the Salone. The Palazzo della Ragione, with its great hall on the upper floor, is reputed to have the largest roof unsupported by columns in Europe; the hall is nearly rectangular, its length 815 m, its breadth 27 m, and its height 24 m; the walls are covered with allegorical frescoes; the building stands upon arches, and the upper storey is surrounded by an open loggia, not unlike that which surrounds the basilica of Vicenza.