University of Padua

During the twenty years of the Fascist regime, known as the Ventennio, the University of Padua was shaped by Fascist ideology. At the Palazzo del Bo, the seat of the university, students could take courses in ‘The History and Doctrine of Fascism and Fascist Culture for Foreigners’. In 1938, when the regime’s anti-Semitic policy was passed, the University introduced measures to expel teachers and students of the ‘Jewish race’, with more than 200 people being excluded from classrooms.

However, following the Armistice of 8^th September 1943, the University was the operational, coordinating, and guiding centre of the Venetian Resistance, so much so that it is the only Italian university to be awarded the Gold Medal for Military Valour (November 1945). 116 people died in the fight against Nazi-Fascism, including 107 students. A statue inside the building is dedicated to one of them, the partisan and battalion commander of the Monte Grappa Division, Primo Visentin.

In 1995, Jannis Kounellis’s work Resistenza e Liberazione (Resistance and Liberation) was inaugurated in the courtyard and remembers the lives of Ezio Franceschini, Egidio Meneghetti and Concetto Marchesi, three anti-fascist professors who played a leading role in the Resistance. Symbolic of this Resistance was the call for insurrection addressed to students by Rector Marchesi’s, founder of the Veneto National Liberation Committee, in his speech for the inauguration of the academic year on 9^th November 1943.