The University of Padua was born in 1222. “Born”, not “founded”, because this university was not established thanks to a privilege, namely a special authorization granted by a Pope or an Emperor, but because circumstances led to its birth.

In point of fact, about a hundred students and professors moved from Bologna to Padua that year because of the “serious offenses against academic freedom there [...] and the non-observance of the privileges solemnly guaranteed to professors and students”.

The free city of Padua was farsighted enough to welcome that group of outsiders.

A similar situation had occurred just a couple of decades earlier in England, where a group of academics and scholars had moved from Oxford to nearby Cambridge and established a new university there. In the case of Oxford it was not so much academic freedom in danger as the very lives of students and professors, since clashes with the townsfolk had led to two deaths.

In Padua, academic freedom and tax concessions were guaranteed by the city government, then by the Carrarèsi feudal lords and later by the Republic of Venice.

For their part, students and professors brought benefits to Padua. They were instrumental in convincing Pope Gregory IX to canonize Anthony of Lisbon in 1232. This Franciscan friar of Portuguese origin died in Padua on the 13th of June 1231 and he soon became known as Saint Anthony of Padua.

In 1222, the fate of those one hundred university students and of the city that welcomed them were joined forever. During the next eight centuries, “Patavina Libèrtas” made it possible for brilliant, courageous thinkers to advance human knowledge.