Palazzo Bo (Bo Palace) and the Anatomical Theatre, University of Padua visitor guide — everything you need to know before visiting

What is Palazzo Bo?

Palazzo Bo is the historic seat of the University of Padua, founded in 1222 and one of Europe's oldest universities. The university moved into this building in 1493, and it has served as the administrative and ceremonial heart of the university ever since, still housing the Rectorate and the School of Law today.

The odd name comes from the Hospitium Bovis, the Inn of the Ox, which stood on the site before the university absorbed it — a small ox still marks the entrance. Visitors come chiefly for the Renaissance courtyards and halls, and for the Anatomical Theatre of 1595, the first permanent room built anywhere for teaching human dissection.

A short history: from the Ox Inn to the university's seat

The University of Padua was founded in 1222 by students and teachers who broke away from Bologna in search of greater academic freedom. For its first two and a half centuries it had no single home, until 1493, when it took over the Hospitium Bovis — the Inn of the Ox — an inn on Via San Biagio that gave the palace its lasting name.

The real transformation came in the second half of the sixteenth century, when the architect Andrea Moroni rebuilt the palace around a new Renaissance courtyard, the Cortile Antico, giving the university the grand, unified seat it still occupies. It remains the administrative heart of the University of Padua today.

Read the full guide: The History of the Palazzo Bo Anatomical Theatre →

The Cortile Antico and its coats of arms

The Cortile Antico, the Old Courtyard, is the architectural heart of Palazzo Bo, rebuilt by Andrea Moroni in the later sixteenth century. Two tiers of columned loggias run around it, and almost every surface between the columns carries a carved coat of arms — hundreds of them, dating from the university's earliest centuries to the close of the seventeenth.

Each shield in the Cortile Antico honours a rector, a professor, or one of the university's historic student "nations" — the associations through which students from a given country organised themselves. Walking the loggia is a stone roll call of the university's international reach, centuries before international education became a marketing phrase.

Galileo's eighteen years at Padua

Galileo Galilei was appointed professor of mathematics at Padua in 1592 and stayed eighteen years, until June 1610 — years he would later call the happiest of his working life. He built his own telescopes here and watched Jupiter's moons for the first time, before the little book that made his name across Europe.

Galileo taught in what is now the Aula Magna, the Great Hall, and drew such crowds that — tradition holds — his own students built him a tall wooden lectern so the back rows could see him over the room. That lectern survives today in the Sala dei Quaranta, next door.

The Sala dei Quaranta and Elena Cornaro Piscopia

The Sala dei Quaranta, the Hall of the Forty, takes its name from the forty portraits of scholars who taught or studied at Padua between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, drawn from more than twenty countries and painted by Gian Giacomo dal Forno. Galileo's own lectern, built so students could see him over a packed room, is preserved here.

On 25 June 1678, the Venetian noblewoman Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia defended a doctorate in philosophy connected to this hall, answering questions on two passages of Aristotle chosen at random. Interest was so great the examination moved to Padua's cathedral, and she became the first woman anywhere to earn a university degree.

The Anatomical Theatre of 1595

The Anatomical Theatre was commissioned in 1594 and inaugurated in 1595 by Girolamo Fabrici d'Acquapendente, who held Padua's chair of surgery and anatomy for fifty years. Where earlier anatomists, including Andreas Vesalius decades before him, had used temporary theatres built and dismantled for each dissection, Fabrici built something permanent: a steep funnel of concentric wooden tiers around a small central floor.

Inaugurated on 16 January 1595, the theatre remains, in essentially its original form, the oldest surviving room of its kind anywhere in the world. The bodies dissected here came from among the executed, and by custom from outside both Padua and Venice — so that neither city watched one of its own on the table.

William Harvey and the theatre's afterlife

William Harvey studied at Padua from December 1599 and graduated a Doctor of Medicine in 1602, taught by Girolamo Fabrici himself — the Anatomical Theatre's founder, who had already discovered valve-like structures inside the veins. Harvey carried that observation home to England, where it fed into his own account of the continuous circulation of blood.

Padua's anatomical tradition kept producing landmark figures after Harvey: more than a century later, Giovanni Battista Morgagni taught here and is remembered as the father of modern pathological anatomy. The theatre itself stayed in continuous use until 1872, when the growing medical school finally moved to purpose-built premises elsewhere in Padua.

Gio Ponti's twentieth-century rooms

From the late 1930s into the early 1940s, under rector Carlo Anti, the university commissioned Gio Ponti to remake Palazzo Bo's ceremonial rooms. Ponti designed roughly five hundred individual pieces — chairs, desks, doors, cabinets — for the Rectorate, the Sala dei Quaranta, the Aula Magna and the four graduation halls, working with Fontana Arte's Pietro Chiesa on the lighting.

The result sits directly against six centuries of older stone and fresco: striped terrazzo floors and bold twentieth-century furniture inside rooms Galileo would still recognise by their proportions. This layer of the palace is shown only on the weekend and public-holiday route, alongside the historic rooms every visitor sees.

What your ticket includes

Your ticket books your place on one of three visits: the weekday Historical tour, the weekend Palazzo Bo and Gio Ponti tour, or the weekend self-guided entrance. All three take in the Cortile Antico, the Aula Magna where Galileo lectured, the Sala dei Quaranta with his lectern, and the Anatomical Theatre of 1595, viewed from its original floor.

Guided departures run in Italian and English — you choose the language when you pick your time — and every route has adult, senior, youth and family fares. Because Palazzo Bo remains a working university building, the exact route can vary slightly around academic events.

Tour times and how the visit works

On weekdays, Palazzo Bo is seen only on the guided Historical tour, with Italian departures through the day and English ones currently at 11:30, 13:30 and 16:30. On Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays the guided route — Palazzo Bo and the Twentieth Century of Gio Ponti — adds the 1930s–40s interiors, with English departures currently at 11:30, 14:30 and 16:30.

On weekend and holiday days you can also book the self-guided entrance, a timed entry with on-site audio points. Whichever route you choose, the meeting point is the ticket office between Palazzo Bo's two internal courtyards, reached from the Via VIII Febbraio entrance — arrive a few minutes before your booked time.

Getting there from Venice and around Padua

Padua sits on the main rail line between Venice and Milan. Direct trains leave Venezia Santa Lucia every 15 to 20 minutes and take as little as 26 minutes to Padova. From Padova station, Palazzo Bo is about a 20-minute walk along Corso del Popolo, or a short ride on tram line SIR1 to the Ponti Romani stop nearby.

Drivers should expect Padua's historic centre to carry the usual Italian limited-traffic restrictions and plan to park on the periphery and walk in. Palazzo Bo's central position means the Scrovegni Chapel, the Basilica of St Anthony, the Orto Botanico and Prato della Valle are all within easy reach on foot or by tram.

Read the full guide: How to Get to Palazzo Bo from Venice →

Frequently asked questions