Padua UniverCity exhibition 21 Sept - 23 Oct 2022

21 September – 23 October, Sala della Musica,  Museum of Geography

Over its eight centuries of history, the University of Padua has shaped and enriched the urban fabric of the city. It has caused people to move by fostering regional, national and European mobility, built up collaboration networks, and stimulated exchanges of ideas at a global level. Through cartographic visuals and infographics, the Padua UniverCity. Geographies of a moving University exhibition invites you to discover the living and pulsating dimension of the University of Padua, its mighty growth and the spatial articulation of a university-city-world.

Over time, Padua has become a university city due to the desire of the University to permeate the urban space, which welcomed it from the very start. Through the exhibition and the related interactive Padua UniverCity web portal it is now possible to reconstruct the history and explore the geography of the physical expansion of the University into and beyond the city of Padua. The University is also made up of the mobile geographies of those who attend and have attended it over the centuries. The exhibition and the portal show the evolutionary trends in the number and provenance of students, technical-administrative staff and university teachers, based on available data from past centuries and with greater precision over the last thirty years. Since its origins, the University of Padua has been a meeting point for people of different backgrounds and cultures. In particular, the last century of its history reflects the cultural growth in society: until the early 20th century, attending university was a privilege reserved to just over 1,500 students. In the 2021-2022 academic year, the University had 69,240 enrollments, the highest peak in its eight centuries of history. The geography of the University of Padua is also made up of networks, relationships and exchanges, which now embrace the entire planet. Padua UniverCity shows also the international dimension of our university, the flows of students entering and leaving Padua with the Erasmus+ and Erasmus Mundus programs, the foreign universities with which the University of Padua has activated agreements and collaborations in the last fifty years, the invisible but growing network of web and social interactions.