The botanical garden of Padua: the first hundred years.

Abstract

The University of Padua dates from the year 1222, when a group of professors and students emigrated there from the twelfth-century University of Bologna. It grew so rapidly in numbers and importance that by the fifteenth century it was attracting not only many Italian scholars, but also students from abroad, notably Germany, Hungary and England. It was one of three Italian universities which founded the first botanical gardens in Europe during the decade 1540-1550: Pisa in the summer of 1543, Padua on 1 July 1545, and Florence on 1 December 1545.1 The late Georgina Masson wrote: ‘The Orto Botanico at Padua was attached to the school of botany at the University, where the first chair of that science had been created shortly before. Even some of the sixteenth century plants survive. The oldest of them all are the chaste tree or Vitex agnus eastus, which was planted in 1550, and the famous palm, Chamaerops humilis arborescens, of 1585.’2