Sala dei Giganti was originally one of the main reception rooms of the palace of the Carraresi, lords of Padua in the fourteenth century. The decorative cycle that gives the room its name was inspired by Petrarch, who was a guest of Francesco I of Carrara while he worked on the drafting of his De Viris Illùstribus, a series of biographies of famous men in history.

The cycle was to include thirty-six historical characters, each accompanied by a tìtulus, a Latin prose text of a celebratory biographical nature. The intent was clear, to endow the Carraresi family with the values that those ancient heroes represented.

Of the original fresco cycle, only the figure of Petrarch remains, albeit heavily retouched over the centuries, in the southwest corner of the room. The rest of the decoration is due to the mid-sixteenth century renovation which converted the building into Palazzo del Capitanio, the “capitanio” being the Venetian military authority.

The new cycle of frescoes took up the historical subject, the tripartite arrangement and the didactic intentions of the fourteenth-century original, but replaced the characters so as to celebrate not a dynasty but the Venetian Republic as a bearer of peace and prosperity.

On the two long walls, in the spaces marked by fake columns, there are forty-four figures of kings and emperors, and characters of the Republican age, proposed as examples of military valour, good governance, justice, and peace. The short walls show portraits of six famous men of letters from Padua or its sphere, the Veneto region’s supreme cultural centre.