Padua

That ambition kept Padua at war. In 1337 the Carrara won the city back from the Della Scala of Verona, who had held it for nine years, and they spent the following decades fighting Verona, Venice and Milan by turns. In 1387 the English condottiero John Hawkwood beat the Veronese for Padua at Castagnaro, but the family had overreached: Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan seized the city in 1388 and held it for two years, and in 1405 Venice defeated the Carrara for good.

Venice then ruled Padua for almost four centuries, sending two of its noblemen to govern it, a podestà for civil affairs and a captain for military ones, while the Paduan councils kept their old statutes. The city's loyalty was tested in 1509, in the War of the League of Cambrai: Imperial supporters held Padua for a few weeks before Venetian troops retook it and beat off the Emperor's siege, and Venice afterwards ringed it with new walls and monumental gates. The university kept drawing the great minds of Europe, Copernicus among its students and Galileo among its teachers, and it was in Padua, in 1610, that Galileo turned a homemade telescope on Jupiter and found its moons.