L. and I drive to Padova in a car from good old Citicar Rentals. We actually got the car yesterday, hauled all the T’Giving stuff to Josh and Audrey’s in the trunk. Now we are going to see the second of three regional Mantegna shows. The first we saw with Mom in Verona and the third is in Mantova- we had planned to hit that show with Roberta and Michael. Mantegna did his major works in and around these three cities, thus the theme.

We also want to see the famous Giotto frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, so beautifully written of by Henry James in his Italian Tales. Padova is a cool city, larger than Verona but no urban jungle. The old center is largely porticoed and has that intimate, meandering Medieval quality. The more urban shopping area has the same fin de siecle vibe one gets in Milan, with streetcars, grand stone edifices, gilt-edged cafes with mirrors and vast, shining bars. Whereas many commercial interiors in Verona seem to have been cheaply renovated in the 80’s, willfully discarding any flavor of recently old Italy, Padova retains traces of the early in the 20th Century along with the truly antique.

The Mantegna is underwhelming, though there are one or two doozies, in particular a set of finely rendered profile portraits by Mantegna and contemporaries. A wall display shows attempted reassembling of a huge Mantegna fresco from the nearby Eremetani Church which was blown to bits near the end of WWII. Maybe a quarter of the original work still remains in the chiesa and one can imagine how awesome it must have been. There were black and white photos taken of the opera entire and the destroyed areas have been projected in real scale on the soaring chapel walls.

We swing through the greater museum in which the Mantegna show is housed. The Padova Museum is situated on the grounds of a small Roman Arena. Not much remains, only a scrap of stone wall and the oval imprint in the landscape. Many other structures came and went over the years. There was a palazzo, now entirely gone, which adjoined the Scrovegni Chapel and this is where we go to see our good friend Giotto.