After the first storm twenty minutes of pleasure: Ravel, Vivaldi and Bach outside the Palazzo Bo, empty streets suddenly fill, as if in reconnection with some other time when music was everywhere in the streets. The violins remind me of other northern towns: Cremona, Mantua, Vercelli. The violinists’ case is quickly full of Euros, two musicians who have spotted a gap in the cultural market of this cultural town.

“…I heard that when the number of students is full, there are at the least one thousand five hundred here: the principall faculties that are professed in the University, being physicke and the civill law: and more students of forraine and remote nations do live in Padua, then in any one university of Christendome. For hither come in, many from France, high Germany, the Netherlands, England, &c. who with great desire flocke together to Padua for good letters sake, as to a fertile nursery, and sweet emporium and mart town of learning. For indeed it hath bred many famous and singular learned men within these hundred yeares, and a little more…”