Padua… wasn’t Anakin Skywalker one of those
Leffe for me, radioactive juice for you….
Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias. Padua/Padova is about half an hour away from Venice, and as a consequence, the majority of tourists seem to drive past it. This is a good thing, as an abundance of tourists is a pain… even though we constituted two more. We saw quite a few groups during the day, being led past the 12th century market (the building I think is a little newer than that, but not by a whole lot) or being taken to rub the old bones of St Antony in the basilica, or at least the back of his sarcophagus. Padua also has miles of covered pavements, porticos, for whatever reason. The weather is not going to be a problem there because you can traverse the entire historic centre of the city under cover. We took the tour of the piazza del bo, which is part of the university. 1222 they started here, so there’s a history of learning. The reason we did the tour is that they have the worlds oldest dissection theatre. It’s tiny, a room the size of a small bathroom with six steep tiers above it in an inverted cone shape. They had a special dispensation from the pope to let them cut up criminals. That and sitting in the lecture hall that Galileo lectured in (spruced up a bit, some paint, some additional parquet flooring) were pretty good highlights.
As for the Padovese, well, they like their Aperol spritz, it’s an aperitif similar to campari, which they also drink in huge numbers. They also seemed to flock to one stall at the side of the market and when we looked they were going mad for octopus. Simple boiled octopi, we asked for a small one, and the stallholder deftly sliced the head in two, scooped off the beak, took out the bits you shouldn’t eat and chopped up the rest. He drizzled it with olive oil, a bit of parlsey and there it was, waiting to be polished off by skillful use of toothpicks. It was lovely… mmmm octopus brains… you can taste the intelligence.
Tags: italy, padova
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