Palazzo della Ragione

Begun in 1218 as Padua's palace of justice, the Salone roofs a single hall 82 meters long beneath a ceiling shaped like an inverted ship's hull. After a fire in 1420, painters covered the walls with an astrological cycle of 333 scenes, and the great room still floats above the daily market squares.

Why it matters

The Palazzo della Ragione is medieval civic engineering at the largest scale. Raised from 1218 as the seat of Padua's courts, it was transformed between 1306 and 1308, when the architect Fra Giovanni degli Eremitani merged the upper rooms into one enormous hall and replaced the roofs with the hull-shaped structure that gives the Salone its silhouette. The municipal culture portal calls the result one of the largest suspended halls in Europe — 82 meters long and 27 wide, carried above open porticoes without interior supports.

The hall is also a planetary textbook. Its walls carry a rare survival among medieval astrological cycles: 333 painted panels arranged in three bands, mapping the cosmos, the months, the trades and the temperaments of man according to the astrological science of Padua's university. You do not need to share the science to be moved by the ambition — a room-sized image of how the universe was thought to work.

What to notice

Give the painted walls time. The three overlapping bands of frescoes run the length of the hall, and the iconography descends from the studies of Pietro d'Abano, the Paduan physician and astrologer whose theories the painters translated into image: zodiac signs, patron deities, the labors of the months, allegories of the sciences. The cycle read today was repainted after the fire of 1420 by the Paduan master Nicolò Miretto with Stefano da Ferrara and others.

On the floor, find the pietra del Vituperio, the stone of shame, where insolvent debtors, stripped to their undergarments, had to strike the stone three times with their bare skin — the origin of an Italian idiom about ending in underdrawers. Under the far end hangs the enormous wooden horse, built by Annibale Capodilista for a joust and later donated by his family to the city; children measure themselves against its legs. Since 2006 a Foucault pendulum swings from the ceiling on a twenty-meter wire, its slow arc demonstrating the earth's rotation in the middle of a fourteenth-century cosmos.

Context and history

The palace was the courthouse of the free commune, and its name — palace of reason — belongs to that judicial function; below its porticoes the two market squares, delle Erbe and della Frutta, have traded since the Middle Ages. Fra Giovanni degli Eremitani's 1306–1308 reconstruction created the great hall and the ship-hull roof. Giotto and his workshop were commissioned for the first painted cycle in the early fourteenth century; the fire of 1420, which also destroyed the nearby Carraresi archive, consumed it, and the Miretto-Stefano repainting followed within a few years. The building passed from the commune through the signoria and the Venetian state, always keeping its market hall beneath and its ceremonial hall above; it now belongs to the civic museum system as one of the monumental venues, opened to visitors as Il Salone.