Follow Via VIII Febbraio to the Palazzo del Bò, seat of Padua’s history-making university. This institution was founded by renegade scholars from Bologna seeking greater intellectual freedom, and some of Italy’s greatest and most controversial thinkers taught here, including Copernicus, Galileo, Casanova, and the world’s first woman doctor of philosophy, Eleonora Lucrezia Corner Piscopia (her statue graces the stairs). Guided tours cover Galileo’s lecture hall and the world’s first Anatomy Theatre, a six-tiered hall built for scientific autopsy in 1594 before biohazards were understood – dissected corpses were dumped into an underground stream.
