Torre dell'Orologio

Between Palazzo dei Camerlenghi and Palazzo del Capitanio, Padua's Clock Tower holds an astronomical dial that places Earth at the centre of the cosmos. The present tower was raised in 1423 on the site of an earlier clock built by Jacopo Dondi in the fourteenth century.

Why it matters

Padua's civic museums describe the dial as Europe's oldest clock with an astronomical display. In the mid-fourteenth century, Jacopo Dondi placed a clock on the entrance tower of the Carrarese residence, indicating hours, months, moon phases and the sun's course through the zodiac. The current tower is a Venetian reconstruction on the gate of the demolished palace. Its geocentric dial preserves the cosmology of the earlier instrument.

What to notice

The dial places Earth at the centre. A Roman-numeral band marks twenty-four hours alla italiana; copper stars turn within it, and the zodiac occupies a further ring. Eleven signs are shown: Scorpio occupies two compartments, while Libra is absent. The official account rejects a legend that a resentful clockmaker omitted Libra and instead points to an earlier zodiac in which Scorpio and Libra formed a single constellation. The tower has five floors: the lower three once housed the clockwork, while the upper two were the clockmaker-custodian's dwelling. Exterior displays also show the time, date and other information.

Context and history

Jacopo Dondi's fourteenth-century clock was lost when the tower on the Carrarese gate was destroyed in the wars between the Carraresi and Visconti in 1388–90. Under Venetian rule, a new tower was built on the eastern gate's ruins. It was raised to about thirty metres in 1423, when Matteo Novello and Giovanni and Gian Pietro delle Caldiere installed a clock modelled on Dondi's. In 1532 Giovanni Maria Falconetto reworked the Palazzo del Capitanio entrance as a triumphal arch with four columns and the Lion of Saint Mark. Later alterations included a pendulum and bronze bell; a nineteenth-century restoration returned the twenty-four-hour dial seen today. The Dondi family became known as Dondi dell'Orologio, “Dondi of the Clock.”