The theatre is crowded, the audience is trembling with expectation. An orchestra is playing, while candlelight illuminates the centre of the room. Everything is ready. Enter the main characters: the anatomy professor and the corpse of a man who has just been executed. Silence fills the room, the autopsy begins: it is a candid lesson held in person that can last up to a week, a real “spectacle” that everyone wants to see. The stage is unique, it is called the Anatomical Theatre. It is the world’s first example of a permanent structure created for the teaching of anatomy, one of the foundations of the birth of modern medicine in Europe and the world. Opened on 16 January 1595, under the guidance of the great sixteenth-century anatomist Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente, the theatre is a symbol of the excellence of Paduan medical science. It is a thread that leads from Andreas Vesalius and William Harvey to Giovanni Battista Morgagni to the present day and the achievements of contemporary medicine.

Knowledge is freedom.