Palazzo Zuckermann
On Corso Garibaldi, halfway between Padua's train station and the Scrovegni Chapel, Palazzo Zuckermann announces itself with a facade that can't quite decide between neoclassical restraint and Liberty-style ornament — and is more interesting for it. Step inside and the ground floor opens onto a courtyard where fragments of the old city walls still stand, quietly absorbed into the structure.
The building holds two distinct collections across its upper floors: a museum of applied and decorative arts spanning the medieval period to the late nineteenth century, and the Bottacin collection — a businessman's lifetime of obsessive gathering, including over a hundred thousand coins and prints by Rembrandt, Tiepolo and Dürer.
💛 What travellers fall for
The Bottacin library on the second floor is worth lingering over: more than 25,000 volumes on numismatics, and the seventeenth-century Bottacin Code — an illustrated album of Venetian feasts and costumes that reads like a private dispatch from another century. The 1792 Cozzi porcelain coffee service on the first floor is a small, precise thing that stops most people mid-step.
The story behind Palazzo Zuckermann
Enrico Zuckermann, an industrialist, commissioned Milanese architect Filippo Arosio to build the palazzo between 1912 and 1914. Its address on Corso Garibaldi was deliberate — the street had been laid out to run directly from the new railway station into the city centre, and a residence here signalled arrival into Padua's emerging middle-class order.
For much of the twentieth century the building served as Padua's main post office, a practical repurposing that left it largely intact. In 2005 it joined the Eremitani Civic Museums complex, and the collections it now houses predate it considerably: Nicola Bottacin donated his eclectic trove — coins, prints, the illustrated Bottacin Code — to the city back in 1865.
Good to know
Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; closed Mondays (except public holidays), 25–26 December, 1 January and 1 May. A combined ticket with the Museo Eremitani costs €11. The walk from Padova station takes 10–15 minutes; buses 3, 10 and 12 also run the route. An hour to two hours covers it comfortably.
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What travellers say about Palazzo Zuckermann
Museo Bottacin is a small museum located on the second floor of Palazzo Zuckermann. The museum features a large sculpture room, two rooms with 19th century Italian paintings and period furniture, and a large numismatic collection. The sculpture room is the most spectacular part – an excellent selection of 19th-century sculptures, professionally illuminated against a black background. Best presentation of period sculptures I have seen in Italian museums. The number of paintings is small, but there are some major artists – Induno, Schiavoni, Querena. The museum is well worth a visit if you are in Padua. It is just across the Civic Museum with its extensive collection of old masters and the Scrovegni Chapel.
The place is great and there are actually 3 museums for the price of one. The Botaccin museum was a very pleasant surprise. The numismatic collection is one of the most precious in Europe. They have coins from Antic Egypt, Antic Greece, Roman Empire etc
You need to get your ticket from the Eremitani museum. Also it could use more English labels…
Where is the plaque that explains what this is? My favorite piece in the whole museum and I can’t know what it is.
The first rain day we’ve had in a while so we decided to go to this museum. I must say it was enjoyable. It had a lot of unusual things that were from past centuries, Jewelry fans, art the main focus is on the coin but I thought his artwork was much more interesting for me.
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