Palazzo del Bo is the historic seat of the university of Padua and takes its name from an inn that stood here, at the sign of the ox. Inside is the room that changed medicine: the anatomical theatre built in 1594, the oldest permanent one in the world, a wooden funnel of six tiers of galleries where students stood, packed tight, looking down at the table on which a body was dissected.
What to see
The theatre is small, steep and dark, lit by the candles the students held in their hands; you look in from above and grasp at once the discomfort and the determination of those who spent their nights there. A little further on is Galileo's lectern, from which he taught for eighteen years before leaving for Florence, and the Hall of the Forty with the portraits of the most illustrious foreign students.
In the old courtyard and along the staircases are thousands of painted and carved coats of arms: those of the rectors and counsellors of the students, for in Padua it was the students who governed the university. And there is the statue of Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, who graduated here in 1678: the first woman in the world to receive a university degree, in philosophy, after being refused permission to graduate in theology.
Visiting
The palace is on via VIII Febbraio, right in the centre, opposite the Pedrocchi café; it is visited only on guided tours at fixed times and by booking, with a ticket. An hour. It is a working university building: lectures and degree ceremonies are held in the same rooms.
Our editors' tip
In the anatomical theatre, while the guide is talking, look at the wood of the first-tier rail: it is worn away by hands. Then think that for two centuries these bodies arrived at night and nobody could say where they came from, and that the whole of modern anatomy was written standing up in this room.