100 Notable alumni of University of Padua

Camillo Boito was an Italian architect and engineer, and a noted art critic, art historian and novelist. He was the brother of Arrigo Boito, the friend and librettist of the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi.

Francesco Carnelutti was an Italian jurist and lawyer.

Karl Ritter von Ghega or Karl von Ghega was an Austrian-Albanian nobleman and the designer of the Semmering Railway from Gloggnitz to Mürzzuschlag. During his time, he was the most prominent of Austrian railway engineers and architects.

Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, sometimes Augier Ghislain de Busbecq, was a 16th-century Flemish writer, herbalist and diplomat in the employ of three generations of Austrian monarchs. He served as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople and in 1581 published a book about his time there, Itinera Constantinopolitanum et Amasianum, re-published in 1595 under the title of Turcicae epistolae or...

Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, Comte de La Baume Saint Amour, typically known as Cardinal Granvelle in English, was a Burgundian statesman, made a cardinal, who followed his father as a leading minister of the Spanish Habsburgs. Granvelle was one of the most influential European politicians during the time which immediately followed the appearance of Protestantism in Europe; "the dominating Imperial...

Girolamo Fabrici d'Acquapendente, also known as Girolamo Fabrizio or Hieronymus Fabricius, was a pioneering anatomist and surgeon known in medical science as "The Father of Embryology".

Peter Martyr Vermigli was an Italian-born Reformed theologian. His early work as a reformer in Catholic Italy and his decision to flee for Protestant northern Europe influenced some other Italians to convert and flee as well. In England, he influenced the Edwardian Reformation, including the Eucharistic service of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. He was considered an authority on...

Andrea Zanzotto was an Italian poet.

Paolo Giovio was an Italian physician, historian, biographer, and prelate.

Alberto Stefani is an Italian politician serving as President of Veneto since 2025. He was first elected in the 2018 general election, and was re-elected in 2022. From 2019 to 2024, he served as mayor of Borgoricco. Since 2023, he has served as secretary of Liga Veneta and federal vice-secretary since 2024.

Giuseppe Berto was an Italian writer and screenwriter He is mostly known for his novels The Sky Is Red (Il cielo è rosso) and Incubus (Il male oscuro).

James Gregory FRS was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer. His surname is sometimes spelt as Gregorie, the original Scottish spelling. He described an early practical design for the reflecting telescope – the Gregorian telescope – and made advances in trigonometry, discovering infinite series representations for several trigonometric functions.

Pietro Pomponazzi was an Italian philosopher. He is sometimes known by his Latin name, Petrus Pomponatius.

Lawrence of Brindisi, OFM Cap., born Giulio Cesare Russo, was an Italian Catholic priest, theologian and member of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin. An accomplished linguist, in addition to his native Italian, Lawrence could read and speak Latin, Hebrew, Greek, German, Czech, Spanish, and French fluently. Lawrence was ordained a priest at the age of 23. Lawrence was beatified...

Santorio Santorio whose real name was Santorio Santori (or de' Sanctoriis) better known in English as Sanctorius of Padua was an Italian physiologist, physician, and professor, who introduced the quantitative approach into the life sciences and is considered the father of experimental physiology. He is also known as the inventor of several medical devices. His work De Statica Medicina, written...

Daniele Franco is an Italian economist, central banker and civil servant who served as Minister of Economy and Finance in the cabinet of Prime Minister Mario Draghi from 2021 to 2022. From 2020 until 2021, he served as director-general of the Bank of Italy.

Felice Casorati was an Italian painter, sculptor, and printmaker. The paintings for which he is most noted include figure compositions, portraits and still lifes, which are often distinguished by unusual perspective effects.

Étienne Dolet was a French scholar, translator and printer. He was a controversial figure throughout his lifetime, which was buffeted by the opposing forces of the Renaissance and the French Inquisition. His early attacks upon the Inquisition and the municipal authorities of Toulouse, together with his later publications in Lyon, caused the French Inquisition to monitor his activities closely.

Giacomo Rizzolatti is an Italian neurophysiologist who works at the University of Parma. Born in Kyiv, UkSSR, he is the Senior Scientist of the research team that discovered mirror neurons in the frontal and parietal cortex of the macaque monkey, and has written many scientific articles on the topic. He also proposed the premotor theory of attention. He is a...

Massimo Polidoro is an Italian psychologist, writer, journalist, television personality, and co-founder and executive director of the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Pseudosciences (CICAP).

Jan Jesenius, also written as Jessenius, was a Bohemian physician, anatomist, politician and philosopher. He was active in Prague, where he gained fame after he conducted a public dissection of a human body for scientific purposes. He was publicly executed following the Battle of White Mountain.

Vittorino da Feltre was an Italian humanist and teacher. He was born in Feltre, Belluno, Republic of Venice and died in Mantua. His real name was Vittorino Rambaldoni. It was in Vittorino that the Renaissance idea of the complete man, or l'uomo universale — health of body, strength of character, wealth of mind — reached its first formulation.

Niccolò Tommaseo was a Dalmatian Italian linguist, journalist and essayist, the editor of a Dizionario della Lingua Italiana (A Dictionary of the Italian Language) in eight volumes (1861–74), of a dictionary of synonyms (1830) and other works. He is considered a precursor of the Italian irredentism.

Simon Marius was a German astronomer. He was born in Gunzenhausen, near Nuremberg, but spent most of his life in the city of Ansbach. He is best known for being among the first observers of the four largest moons of Jupiter, and his publication of his discovery led to charges of plagiarism.

Bernardino Telesio was an Italian philosopher and natural scientist. While his natural theories were later disproven, his emphasis on observation made him the "first of the moderns" who eventually developed the scientific method.

Erika Stefani is an Italian lawyer and politician who served as the Italian Minister of Regional Affairs and Autonomies from 1 June 2018 to 5 September 2019 and as the Italian Minister for Disabilities since 13 February 2021. A member of Lega Nord, she has served as a member of the Italian Senate since 15 March 2013.

Antonio Francesco Davide Ambrogio Rosmini-Serbati, IC was an Italian Catholic priest and philosopher. He founded the Rosminians, officially the Institute of Charity, and pioneered the concept of social justice and Italian Liberal Catholicism.

Alessandro Ignazio Marcello was an Italian nobleman and composer.

Giancarlo Galan is an Italian politician.

Tullio Levi-Civita, ForMemRS was an Italian mathematician, most famous for his work on absolute differential calculus (tensor calculus) and its applications to the theory of relativity, but who also made significant contributions in other areas. He was a pupil of Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, the inventor of tensor calculus. His work included foundational papers in both pure and applied mathematics, celestial mechanics...

Daniele Manin was an Italian patriot, statesman and leader of the Risorgimento in Venice.

Thomas Cajetan OP, also known as Gaetanus, commonly Tommaso de Vio or Thomas de Vio, was an Italian philosopher, theologian, the Master of the Order of Preachers 1508 to 1518, and cardinal from 1517 until his death. He was a leading theologian of his day who is now best known as the spokesman for Catholic opposition to the teachings of...

Ulisse Aldrovandi was an Italian naturalist, the moving force behind Bologna's botanical garden, one of the first in Europe. Carl Linnaeus and the comte de Buffon reckoned him the father of natural history studies. He is usually referred to, especially in older scientific literature in Latin, as Aldrovandus; his name in Italian is equally given as Aldroandi.

Girolamo Fracastoro was an Italian physician, poet, and scholar in mathematics, geography and astronomy. Fracastoro subscribed to the philosophy of atomism, and rejected appeals to hidden causes in scientific investigation. His studies of the mode of syphilis transmission are an early example of epidemiology.

Fausto Veranzio was a Croatian polymath, diplomat and bishop from Šibenik, then part of the Republic of Venice. He is a scientist recognised for his genius as both a Croatian and as a Croatian-Hungarian.

Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli was an Italian mathematician, astronomer, and cosmographer. Born in Florence, he was a notable local Renaissance figure. Christopher Columbus carried his map (depicting Asia to the west of Europe) on his first voyage to the New World.

Paolo Sarpi, O.S.M. was an Italian Servite friar and Catholic priest who was a notable historian, scientist, canon lawyer, polymath and statesman active on behalf of the Venetian Republic during the period of its successful defiance of the papal interdict (1605–1607) and its war (1615–1617) with Austria over the Uskok pirates. His writings, frankly polemical and highly critical of the...

Anna Kuliscioff was a Russian-born Italian revolutionary, a prominent feminist, an anarchist influenced by Mikhail Bakunin, and eventually a Marxist socialist militant. She was mainly active in Italy, where she was one of the first women to graduate in medicine.

Alexandros Mavrokordatos was a Greek statesman, diplomat, politician and member of the Mavrokordatos family of Phanariots.

Alessandro Zan is an Italian left-wing politician and LGBT activist.

Janus Pannonius was an influential intellectual in the Kingdom of Hungary, a Latinist, poet, diplomat and Bishop of Pécs. He was the most significant poet of the Renaissance in the Kingdom of Hungary and one of the better-known figures of humanist poetry in Europe.

Marko Marulić Splićanin was a Croatian poet, lawyer, judge, and Renaissance humanist. He is the national poet of Croatia. According to George J. Gutsche, Marulić's epic poem Judita "is the first long poem in Croatian", and "gives Marulić a position in his own literature comparable to Dante in Italian literature." Marulić's Latin poetry is of such high quality that his...

Marsilius of Padua was an Italian scholar, trained in medicine, who practiced a variety of professions. He was also an important 14th-century political figure. His political treatise Defensor pacis (The Defender of Peace), an attempt to refute papal claims to a "plenitude of power" in affairs of both church and state, is seen by some scholars as the most revolutionary...

Edoardo Stoppa is an Italian television personality.

Norma Cossetto was an Istrian Italian student, killed by the Yugoslavian communists and thrown into a foiba.

Sara Cunial is an Italian politician, formerly of the Five Star Movement. She is the founder and leader of Vita and led the electoral list into the 2022 Italian general election but was not re-elected.

Francesco Guicciardini was an Italian historian and statesman. A friend and critic of Niccolò Machiavelli, he is considered one of the major political writers of the Italian Renaissance. In his masterpiece, The History of Italy, Guicciardini paved the way for a new style in historiography with his use of government sources to support arguments and the realistic analysis of the...

Luigi Nono was an Italian avant-garde composer of classical music.

Mariano Rumor was an Italian politician and statesman. A member of the Christian Democracy (DC), he served as the 39th prime minister of Italy from December 1968 to August 1970 and again from July 1973 to November 1974. As prime minister, he led five different governments, supported by various coalitions.

Gianni De Michelis was an Italian politician, and a member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), who served as minister in many Italian governments in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia or Elena Lucrezia Corner ( Venetian: [koɾˈnɛɾ], Italian: [korˈnɛr]), also known in English as Helen Cornaro, was a Venetian philosopher of noble descent who in 1678 became one of the first women to receive an academic degree from a university and the first to receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree.

Carlo Nordio is an Italian politician, former magistrate and prosecutor, who has served as Italian Minister of Justice since 22 October 2022, in Giorgia Meloni's government. In the 2022 Italian presidential election he was the candidate of Brothers of Italy for President of Italy. In the 2022 Italian general election he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies.

Jan Sariusz Zamoyski was a Polish nobleman, magnate, statesman and the 1st ordynat of Zamość. He served as the Royal Secretary from 1565, Deputy Chancellor from 1576, Grand Chancellor of the Crown from 1578, and Great Hetman of the Crown from 1581.

Renato Brunetta is an Italian economist and politician. He was the Minister of Public Administration and Innovation from 8 May 2008 to 16 November 2011 in the Berlusconi government. He was also the Minister for Public Administration in the Draghi government, from 13 February 2021 until 22 October 2022. He was the head of Forza Italia's deputies group at the...

Franco Basaglia was an Italian psychiatrist, neurologist, professor, and disability advocate who proposed the dismantling of psychiatric hospitals, pioneer of the modern concept of mental health, Italian psychiatry reformer, figurehead and founder of Democratic Psychiatry, architect, and principal proponent of Law 180, which abolished mental hospitals in Italy. He is considered to be the most influential Italian psychiatrist of the...

Pope Alexander VIII, born Pietro Vito Ottoboni, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 6 October 1689 to his death in February 1691. He is the most recent pope to take the pontifical name "Alexander".

Pietro Bembo, O.S.I.H. was a Venetian scholar, poet, and literary theorist who also was a member of the Knights Hospitaller and a cardinal of the Catholic Church. As an intellectual of the Italian Renaissance (15th–16th c.), Pietro Bembo greatly influenced the development of the Tuscan dialect as a literary language for poetry and prose, which, by later codification into a...

Alessandro Valignano, S.J., sometimes Valignani, was an Italian Jesuit priest and missionary born in Chieti, part of the Kingdom of Naples, who helped supervise the introduction of Catholicism to the Far East, and especially to Japan.

Pope Pius IV, born Giovanni Angelo Medici, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 25 December 1559 to his death, in December 1565. Born in Milan, his family considered itself a branch of the House of Medici and used the same coat of arms. Although modern historians have found no proof of this connection,...

Massimo Cacciari is an Italian philosopher and politician who served as Mayor of Venice from 1993 to 2000 and from 2005 to 2010.

Federico Faggin is an Italian-American physicist, engineer, inventor and entrepreneur. He is best known for designing the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004. He led the 4004 (MCS-4) project and the design group during the first five years of Intel's microprocessor effort. Faggin also created, while working at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968, the self-aligned MOS (metal–oxide–semiconductor) silicon-gate technology (SGT), which...

Francysk Skaryna was a Belarusian humanist, physician and translator. He is known to be one of the first book printers in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and in all of Eastern Europe, laying the groundwork for the development of the Belarusian izvod of the Church Slavonic language.

Giuseppe Tartini was an Italian composer and violinist of the Baroque era born in Pirano in the Republic of Venice (now Piran, Slovenia). Tartini was a prolific composer, composing over a hundred pieces for the violin, the majority of them violin concertos. He is best remembered for his Violin Sonata in G Minor (the Devil's Trill Sonata).

Pope Clement XIII, born Carlo della Torre di Rezzonico, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 6 July 1758 to his death in February 1769. He was installed on 16 July 1758.

Pope Innocent VIII, born Giovanni Battista Cybo (or Cibo), was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 29 August 1484 to his death, in July 1492. Son of the viceroy of Naples, Cybo spent his early years at the Neapolitan court. He became a priest in the retinue of Cardinal Calandrini, half-brother to Pope Nicholas...

Torquato Tasso was an Italian poet of the 16th century, known for his 1581 poem Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the Siege of Jerusalem of 1099.

David Parenzo is an Italian journalist and radio/television presenter. He is mostly known for being host, together with Giuseppe Cruciani, of the Italian radio show La Zanzara.

Tommaso Campanella OP, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet.

Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist and writer who has worked in Italy, the United States, France, and Canada. He is currently Emeritus Professor at the Centre de Physique Théorique of Marseille in France, a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute, core member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy of Western University in Canada, and Fractal Faculty...

Reginald Pole was an English cardinal and the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, holding the office from 1556 to 1558 during the Marian Restoration of Catholicism.

Prince Jeremi Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki, nicknamed Hammer on the Cossacks, was a notable member of the aristocracy of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Prince of Vyshnivets, Lubny and Khorol in the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the father of the future King of Poland, Michael I.

Ugo Foscolo, born Niccolò Foscolo, was an Italian writer, revolutionary and poet.

Francis de Sales, C.O., O.M. was a Savoyard Catholic prelate who served as Bishop of Geneva and is a saint of the Catholic Church. He became noted for his deep faith and his gentle approach to the religious divisions in his land resulting from the Protestant Reformation. He is known also for his writings on the topic of spiritual direction...

Count Ioannis Antoniou Kapodistrias, sometimes anglicized as John Capodistrias, was a Greek statesman who was one of the most distinguished politicians and diplomats of 19th-century Europe.

William Harvey was an English physician who made influential contributions to anatomy and physiology. He was the first known physician to describe completely, and in detail, pulmonary and systemic circulation as well as the specific process of blood being pumped to the brain and the rest of the body by the heart (though earlier writers, such as Realdo Colombo, Michael...

Jan Kochanowski was a Polish Renaissance poet who wrote in Latin and Polish and established poetic patterns that would become integral to the Polish literary language. He has been called the greatest Polish poet before Adam Mickiewicz (the latter, a leading Romantic writer) and one of the most influential Slavic poets prior to the 19th century.

Giacomo Girolamo Casanova was an adventurer and writer who was born in the Republic of Venice and travelled extensively throughout Europe. He is chiefly remembered for his autobiography, written in French and published posthumously as Histoire de ma vie ("The Story of My Life"). That work has come to be regarded as a unique and provocative source of information on...

Stephen Báthory was King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania as well as Prince of Transylvania (1576–1586), after previously being Voivode of Transylvania (1571–1576).

Andries van Wezel, latinized as Andreas Vesalius, was an anatomist and physician who wrote De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem (On the fabric of the human body in seven books), which is considered one of the most influential books on human anatomy and a major advance over the long-dominant work of Galen. Vesalius is often referred to as the founder...

Albertus Magnus OP, also known as Saint Albert the Great, Albert of Swabia, Albert von Bollstadt, or Albert of Cologne, was a German Dominican friar, philosopher, scientist, and bishop. He is considered one of the greatest medieval philosophers and thinkers.

Ippolito Nievo was an Italian writer, journalist and patriot. His Confessions of an Italian is widely considered the most important novel about the Italian Risorgimento.

Gerolamo Cardano was an Italian polymath whose interests and proficiencies ranged through those of mathematician, physician, biologist, physicist, chemist, astrologer, astronomer, philosopher, music theorist, writer, and gambler. He became one of the most influential mathematicians of the Renaissance and one of the key figures in the foundation of probability; he introduced the binomial coefficients and the binomial theorem in the...

Beniamino "Nino" Andreatta was an Italian economist and politician. He was a member of Christian Democracy, and one of the founders of the Italian People's Party in 1994 and of the Olive Tree centre-left coalition in 1996.

Pope Gregory XIV, born Niccolò Sfondrato or Sfondrati, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 5 December 1590 to his death, in October 1591.

Pope Urban VII, born Giovanni Battista Castagna, was head of the Catholic Church, and ruler of the Papal States from 15 to 27 September 1590. His papacy was the shortest recognized in history.

Pope Paul V, born Camillo Borghese, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 16 May 1605 to his death, in January 1621. In 1611, he honored Galileo Galilei as a member of the papal Accademia dei Lincei and supported his discoveries. In 1616, Pope Paul V instructed Cardinal Robert Bellarmine to inform Galileo that...

Pope Clement VIII, born Ippolito Aldobrandini, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 30 January 1592 to his death in March 1605.

Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni was an Italian playwright and librettist from the Republic of Venice. His works include some of Italy's most famous and best-loved plays. Audiences have admired the plays of Goldoni for their ingenious mix of wit and honesty. His plays offered his contemporaries images of themselves, often dramatizing the lives, values, and conflicts of the emerging middle classes....

Gabriele Falloppio was an Italian Catholic priest and anatomist often known by his Latin name Fallopius. He was one of the most important anatomists and physicians of the sixteenth century, giving his name to the fallopian tube.

Giovanni Pico dei conti della Mirandola e della Concordia, known as Pico della Mirandola, was an Italian Renaissance nobleman and philosopher. He is famed for the events of 1486, when, at the age of 23, he proposed to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy, and magic against all comers, for which he wrote the Oration on the Dignity...

Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance polymath who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. The publication of Copernicus's model in his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), just before his death in 1543, was a major event in the history of science, triggering the Copernican...

Robert Bellarmine SJ was an Italian Jesuit and a cardinal of the Catholic Church. He was canonized a saint in 1930 and named Doctor of the Church, one of only 27 at the time. He was one of the most important figures in the Counter-Reformation.

Lorenzo Fontana is an Italian politician and member of the League (Lega), who is serving as President of the Chamber of Deputies since 14 October 2022.

Georgius Agricola was a German Humanist scholar, mineralogist and metallurgist. Born in the small town of Glauchau, in the Electorate of Saxony of the Holy Roman Empire, he was broadly educated, but took a particular interest in the mining and refining of metals. He was the first to drop the Arabic definite article al-, exclusively writing chymia and chymista in...

Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, Heer van Berkel en Rodenrijs (1600), Gunterstein (1611) and Bakkum (1613), was a Dutch statesman and revolutionary who played an important role in the Dutch struggle for independence from Spain.

Nicholas of Cusa, also referred to as Nicholas of Kues and Nicolaus Cusanus, was a German Catholic bishop and polymath active as a philosopher, theologian, jurist, mathematician, and astronomer. One of the first German proponents of Renaissance humanism, he made spiritual and political contributions to European culture. A notable example of this is his mystical or spiritual writings on "learned...

John of Nepomuk was a saint of Bohemia. He was executed by King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia for disobedience. John was thrown into the Vltava river.

Nikolaus Alois Maria Vinzenz Negrelli, Ritter von Moldelbe was a Tyrolean civil engineer and railroad pioneer mostly active in parts of the Austrian Empire, Switzerland, Germany and Italy.

Arno Kompatscher is an Italian politician and governor of South Tyrol. He is the incumbent president of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, serving his second term non-consecutively since 13 March 2024. He previously served as the president of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol from 15 June 2016 to 7 July 2021.