The Ancient Courtyard

The Ancient Courtyard of Palazzo del Bo was born from the monumentalization of the area where the Hospitium Bovis stood, carried out between 1547 and the 80s of the sixteenth century under the guidance of the Bergamo architect Andrea Moroni, at the time very active in the city and proto of Santa Giustina.

Dominated by the medieval clock tower, the Ancient Courtyard of Palazzo del Bo is an elegant quadrangular courtyard with a double order of columns, whose shape  refers to the gymnasiums and academies of the Greek world. It is surrounded by a double loggia with an architraved structure: the lower one with Doric columns and the upper one with Ionic type, with decorative elements related to the world of sciences and arts.

On the vaults and walls of the loggia there are numerous painted and sculpted heraldic coats of arms, precious evidence of the pan-European origin of the University's student corpus. They all belong to the students who reached the highest institutional positions in the university hierarchy, i.e. the rectors, their vicars-mayors and the councillors of their respective nationes, the ethnic-geographical subdivisions in which the students were grouped. This practice took place continuously from the mid-sixteenth century until 1688, the year in which the Serenissima Republic forbade its continuation to prevent the growing exhibitionism of the students from leading to the destruction of previous testimonies.

At the east corner of the courtyard, located at the foot of the Cornaro Staircase, there is also a statue of the world's first female graduate: Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia. A brilliant and cultured young woman of Venetian origin, Elena obtained her PhD in philosophy on June 25, 1678, forever linking the strong meaning of her title to the University of Padua.