Padua ( PAD-ew-ə; Italian: Padova [ˈpaːdova] ; Venetian: Pàdova, Pàdoa or Pàoa) is a city and comune in Veneto, northern Italy, and the capital of the eponymous province of Padua. The city lies on the banks of the river Bacchiglione, 40 kilometres (25 miles) west of Venice and 29 km (18 miles) southeast of Vicenza, and has a population of 214,000 (as of 2011). It is also the economic and communications hub of the area. Padua is sometimes included, with Venice and Treviso, in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area (PATREVE) which has a population of around 2,600,000.

Besides the Bacchiglione, the Brenta River, which once ran through the city, still touches the northern districts. Its agricultural setting is the Venetian Plain. To the city's south west lies the Euganaean Hills, which feature in poems by Lucan, Martial, Petrarch, Ugo Foscolo, and Shelley.

Padua appears twice in the UNESCO World Heritage List: for its Botanical Garden, the most ancient of the world, and the 14th-century frescoes, situated in different buildings of the city centre. – an example is the Scrovegni Chapel painted by Giotto at the beginning of 1300.

The city is picturesque, with a dense network of arcaded streets opening into large communal piazze (squares), and many bridges crossing the various branches of the Bacchiglione, which once surrounded the ancient walls like a moat.

Saint Anthony, the patron saint of the city, was a Portuguese Franciscan who spent part of his life in the city and died there in 1231.

Padua is home to one of the oldest universities in the world, the University of Padua, founded in 1222 and where figures such as Galileo Galilei and Nicolaus Copernicus have taught or studied. In 1610, Galileo observed the moons of Jupiter through a homemade telescope in Padua, marking the second phase of the Copernican Revolution. Today, the university has around 72,000 students and has a profound impact on the city's recreational, artistic and economic activities.

Padua is also the setting for most of the action in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and the namesake of Oscar Wilde's The Duchess of Padua.

Its inhabitants sometimes call Padua "the city of the three withouts", because it is home to the "café without doors" (the Pedrocchi Café, which traditionally never closed), "the meadow without grass" (the Prato della Valle, a former bog that has been converted into one of the largest squares in Europe), and the "saint without a name" (because Paduans traditionally refer to Saint Anthony of Padua simply as "the Saint").