While museum projects include restoring and cleaning of the exhibits, the years leading up to the 800-anniversary celebrations involve major restoration campaigns of the University’s extraordinary historical and artistic heritage.

Main initiatives embrace places and works of great symbolic importance that hold a strong sense of the University’s identity.

Ancient Archives

The first project aimed in 2018 to safeguard the internal furnishings of the Ancient Archives, including the library built between 1698 and 1704 by the Flemish artist Michele Bertens for the Abbey of Santa Giustina in Padua. Transported to the Sala dei Giganti in 1816, Bertens library became the Main University Library until the early twentieth century. Later reassembled and brought to Palazzo Bo by request of Rector Carlo Anti.

Funded by the Padua Rotary Club, the restoration project of the precious naturalistic carved furnishings aims at stopping forms of degradation by eliminating particle debris and blocking biological elements between the scores of each delicate carving.

Aula Magna Galileo Galilei and Gio Ponti furnishings

An intense restoration and preservation project includes the exceptional furnishings and architectural elements designed between 1936 and 1942 by Milanese architect Gio Ponti, commissioned by Rector Carlo Anti for Palazzo Bo.

The unique partnership between client and artist lead to the renovation and decoration of the Aula Magna and surrounding rooms. From the Professors’ Common Rooms to the Rector’s Gallery, the project is an unicum where all different elements bear the unmistakable signature of the great Milanese architect.

Between summer 2021 until February 2022, furnishing restorations encompass tables, chairs, wardrobes, doors, wooden sliding doors, floors of the Aula Magna and the Stairs of Knowledge (Scalone del Sapere) while taking into account the techniques of the epoch based on design and photographic documentation.

Moreover, heritage restoration at Palazzo Bo include:

• The restoration of the paintings in the Hall of the Forties (sala dei Quaranta)
• Restoration of Kounellis’ “Resistance and Liberation”