Day 3: Padova

Today was the beginning of our tour of Padova (Padua). We have been staying in the Best Western Galileo Hotel, located in Padova, for two days now but we have used it more as a base of operations as opposed to a place to visit. Our hotel is beautiful (4 stars!) with a lot of great amenities like a huge breakfast, three-course dinners, nice beds, and even a bidet (haha), but we I was really excited to be able to see some more of the actual city.

Our tour began much earlier than normal (8:15AM bus departure as opposed to 9:30) so we had a lot of sleepy faces in some of the pictures, but we made it out of the hotel and into town to see our first attraction.



Due to a lot of hard work and prying on the part of our faculty advisor Dr. Gillett, we were allowed to visit the famous Scrovegni Chapel. This is a chapel famously containing some of the most influential work in terms of development of painting style. The artist responsible for this beauty, Giotto, was one of the first painters to use perspective and also had a great trick of using colors and shades to create art which seemed to be three-dimensional. Some of the most famous examples include the tears of the mothers in the panel entitled “Massacre of the Innocents” as well as the trees and columns in other smaller scenes.

The chapel was commissioned by the Scrovegni family as a gift to the church which, ironically, was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, famous for her charity. The irony lies in the fact that the Scrovegni family was infamously known for their practices of Usury, or lending money with unfair and outrageous interest rates. The actual layout of the chapel is determined by its purpose, which was to use art to tell the stories of the bible to the mostly illiterate populace. By laying out the scenes in a logical way, they could be “read” much like a comic book. Below these scenes, which were situated on the upper side walls, there were fourteen individual panels, seven to each wall, which represented seven sins (the left wall) and seven virtues (the right wall). These panels were directly parallel to each other and featured matching concepts like unfaithfulness and faithfulness (fidelitas/infidelitas), anger and love (ira/amor), and charity and usury. The back wall of the chapel, divided in half, showed a frightening scene of the devil tormenting the souls of the sinners in Hell on the “sin side” while the “righteous side” displayed Enrico Scrovegni devoting the chapel to God and taking his place among the blessed in Paradise.

These photos are, again, taken in secret (not many museums/churches/cathedrals/chapels actually allow you to take pictures inside), so they may not be that well focused or centered, but they give you all a good idea of the type of beauty that we were privileged to see here in Padova.






Our tour of this chapel even had to be divided in to three groups because of a special limitation at the facility. Due to the possible fluctuation in humidity, it was necessary for only 25 people at a time to visit the inside of the chapel and then only for 15 minutes. The security was very strict for this facility, but we understand and were happy to comply if it meant preserving this art for future generations.

After the chapel we got to walk to the center of town and we were able to see some more of the unique archeological and cultural aspects of Padova. One highlight was the ability to see multiple buildings of the world-famous University of Padova. With over 40,000 students, this school is a definite force in the academic world, but add to that the fact that this is one of the oldest universities in Europe, that it gave the first degree ever to a woman, and that it featured Galileo Galilei as one of its lecturers in philosophy and theology, and you have one awesome institution. While it was Saturday and we were not able to see much in terms of students, we still got a sense of the hold the university has over the community.

Next we walked to one of the premier sights in Padova, the Basilica di San Antonio (Saint Anthony’s Basilica). Featuring domes similar to the Basilica di San Marco in Venice, coming from the Byzantine style, it is easy to see here the sheer size of the building since I could not even fit it into the frame of my camera lens.



As I mentioned, there is very limited use of cameras inside church buildings, so I was not able to get any inside shots. Some highlights of the Basilica, however, have mostly to do with its patron, Saint Anthony. San Antonio was a Franciscan Friar who was a friend and contemporary of St. Francis of Assisi. Within one of the massive church’s chapels, three reliquaries contained some miraculously preserved hundreds of years old remains discovered in the 1980s which are attributed to San Antonio. As he was often called a fiery and charismatic preacher, it is only fitting that Saint Anthony’s lower jaw, tongue, and vocal cords are still intact and on display behind lots of layers of glass.

The basilica overall, in my opinion, was more impressive than the Basilica di San Marco in Venice. The domes are much higher and the decoration is much more ornate and painstakingly done than in San Marco. One of the outside courtyards even had this gigantic Magnolia tree which is over 200 years old!



Much to our delight, we were unexpectedly able to sing one song in the center of the Basilica and we performed Spasyeniye Sodyelal for a group of about 50 to 100 worshipers. It wasn’t our best performance, but the scenery was just too much to take and it was definitely worth it.

After this tour we were given almost four hours of free time which we could use to walk around, shop, and just enjoy ourselves in the sunshine.
After the end of this section of the tour, we rushed back to the hotel to get changed and then hopped on our bus to head to our concert. We had the privilege of sharing the stage of a church in San Donà del Piave with the Coro Monte Peralba (Mount Peralba Choir), a group of adult men who sing traditional songs from the Dolomite region (northern Italy close to the border with Austria). After our concert we were graciously cooked dinner by our hosts and we had a brief and happy goodbye as we left dinner quite late to get back to the hotel.



I am now sitting in the hotel at 2:50AM Italian Time finishing this up because we have a 150 mile bus ride tomorrow and I want to be sure to have some time to sleep and read on that bus, so enjoy the photos and I hope to get some more posts out to you soon!