University of Padua

The University of Padua is an Italian public research university in Padua, founded in 1222 by a group of students and teachers who had left the University of Bologna. It is Italy's second-oldest university and the world's fifth-oldest surviving university, and it was one of the most prominent universities in early modern Europe, known for the rigor of its Aristotelian logic and science. Alongside Bologna it played a central role in the Italian Renaissance, educating figures including the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, and it built a long tradition in medicine and anatomy associated with Andreas Vesalius and Galileo Galilei, who once taught there; its 1594 anatomical theatre is the world's oldest surviving one. As of 2021 the university comprised 32 departments and eight schools with about 72,000 students, and it is part of the Coimbra Group of historical research universities.