"Shakespearean" a Padova Travel Page by traveloturc

Padova or for some people Padua is one of the most important Art Cities in Italy. Its face is marked by 3000 years of history. Founded as a fishermen's village, in the 4th century BC. it became the most important centre of the Venetians.The city is just 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.Padova is the setting for most of the action in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.

The city is a Roman municipium since 45 BC became so powerful that it was reported able to raise two hundred thousand fighting men. Padua, in common with north-eastern Italy, suffered severely from the invasion of the Huns under Attila (452). It then passed under the Gothic kings than Greeks in 540.
Under the Lombards the city of Padua rose in revolt (601) against Agilulf, the Lombard king, The main event of the High Middle Ages was the sack of the city by the Magyars in 899. Carraresi period was a long period of restlessness, for the Carraresi were constantly at war; they were finally extinguished between the growing power of the Visconti and of Venice. Padua prospered economically, and the university (the third in Italy) was founded in 1222, In the "Room of the Forty" remains the chair of Galileo, who taught in Padua from 1592 to 1610. in 1545 as the garden of curative herbs attached to the University's faculty of medicine. It is the oldest botanical garden in the world and still contains an important collection of rare plants.In 1797 the Venetian Republic was wiped off the map by the Treaty of Campo Formio, and Padua was ceded to the Austrian Empire. After the fall of Napoleon, in 1814, the city became part of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia.In 1866 the battle of Koniggratz gave Italy the opportunity to push the Austrians out of the old Venetian republic as Padua and the rest of the Veneto were annexed to the recently united Kingdom of Italy.