Tours in Padua

You notice the arcades first. Padua tucks its streets under stone porticoes, so you can cross half the old town without an umbrella and without much sun either, and everyone just walks that way, close to the shopfronts, past the coffee bars where people stand rather than sit. It gives the city a hush that Venice, half an hour down the tracks, never quite has. Padua doesn't perform for visitors the way its neighbour does. It goes about its own business, which happens to include some of the best of it.

That business is largely academic. The University of Padua has been turning out doctors, astronomers and lawyers for a very long time, and the old buildings around Via VIII Febbraio still carry that weight, the worn stone staircases, the lecture hall where students once crowded into tiers to watch dissections. You can feel the city's age here differently than in a church or a piazza, in the graffiti carved into desks, in the sense that generations of restless young people have passed through the same courtyard. A walk through the centre naturally circles back to this, because so much of Padua's character comes from having always been a city of ideas rather than just a stop on the way somewhere else.

Then there is the other Padua, the one built around faith and open space. The Basilica di Sant'Antonio draws pilgrims and the merely curious alike, its domes rising over a square where market stalls and gelato carts do steady trade. Cover your shoulders before you go in, and give yourself time, because the inside rewards slow looking. Not far off, Prato della Valle opens out into one of the widest civic spaces you'll walk across in Italy, ringed with statues and canals, good for sitting with a coffee and watching the city pass. The Scrovegni Chapel, with its close, dim rooms of frescoed blue, is worth arranging ahead if you can.

Padua rewards a full day, maybe more if you let the markets and the porticoes slow you down. A local guide can walk you through the university, the basilica, the piazzas where the fruit and vegetable stalls set up each morning, and fill in the parts a signboard never does, including the buildings you can't get inside of on your own.