The autumn of "Sabato al Liviano"

Palazzo Liviano was built to a 1934 design by the Milanese architect Gio Ponti, who was already working closely with Rector Carlo Anti on the renovation of Palazzo del Bo. The large fresco in the entrance hall of Palazzo Liviano was the result of a competition announced in 1937, won by the artist Massimo Campigli, who created it between 1939 and 1940. The work depicts archaeology as a source of Italian culture, a heritage belonging both to scholars and to ordinary people. In one section of the vast fresco, Campigli portrays Carlo Anti, Gio Ponti, himself and his wife, Giuditta Campigli.

Among the works of art housed inside the Palazzo is the statue of Titus Livy, created by the sculptor Arturo Martini in 1942 and now placed in the entrance hall of the building. On the third floor of the Palazzo, since 1937, is the Museum of Archaeological Sciences and Art, which preserves a rich heritage of ancient and Renaissance sculptures and ceramics, as well as Greek, Etruscan and Roman finds and a precious collection of casts of classical sculptures.

Connected to Palazzo Liviano is the Hall known as the “Hall of the Giants”, originally one of the principal representative rooms of the Carraresi palace, lords of Padua in the fourteenth century. Between 1539 and 1541 the Captain of Padua, Girolamo Corner, a member of one of the most important Venetian families, promoted a new decoration of the Hall. The complex iconographic programme, strongly inspired by ancient Roman history and the classical world, was entrusted to Domenico Campagnola, Stefano Dall’Arzere and, probably, Gualtiero Padovano. On the two long walls, marked by fake columns, there is a sequence of 44 figures of kings and emperors, from Romulus to Charlemagne, and famous protagonists of the republican age, presented as models of military valour, good government, justice and peace. The short walls instead feature six men of letters, from Padua or connected with the city’s cultural milieu, underlining the central role of the “Livian city” and its university as the foremost cultural hub of Veneto.