CA’ FOSCARI

Ca’ Foscari University is Italy’s first business school and the second in Europe. Over thirty languages are taught at the university. Like the city of Venice which hosts it, the university is a crossroads of culture, fields of research, ideas and creativity.Ca’ Foscari is a modern and dynamic university which, in its eight departments, carries out advanced research projects and innovative study programmes in order to guarantee excellent tertiary educational opportunities. Thanks to its five Interdepartmental schools, Ca’ Foscari offers its students fully integrated, cross-disciplinary study opportunities. Thus, a student in Venice can gain wider and better-structured qualifications: for example, Economics embraces Cultural Patrimony, Languages combine with Economics, Restoration encounters Science. Ca’ Foscari University of Venice also grants companies and external institutions the use of its venues – real “jewels” in the heart of Venice of remarkable historical, artistic, cultural and architectural interest.

Ca’ Foscari is well aware of the university’s role in the formation of future generations and in the spreading of awareness in society. It has adopted the concept of “sustainability” as scholars have defined it since the middle of last century.

The University identifies sustainability as a process which pursues environmental safeguards, the community’s wellbeing, social equality and economic development. It pays particular attention to its responsibilities in the education of its students as their future behaviour and decisions will also be influenced by the teaching they have gained during their time at university.

To this end, Ca’ Foscari has for many years been committed to identifying practices and methods which lead to the development, conservation and enhancement of an environment which increases the community’s wellbeing through a policy of sustainability. The commitment that the university has undertaken has among its goal a reduction in the university’s environmental impact and the promotion of a more responsible way of life among the members of the Ca’ Foscari university community: goals which can be obtained through constant works of analysis and research and thanks to the experiences gained over the years.

The university has identified three sectors in which to integrate sustainability in the actions and behaviour of all its members: teaching-research, governance and environment-community. Through its involvement the Ca’ Foscari University aims at creating awareness and the diffusion of the best practices and the values of sustainability.

The Ateneo Veneto’s “mission”

The Ateneo Veneto since 1812 is committed to fostering science, literature, art and culture in all forms. It is composed by three-hundred Members, all resident in the Veneto region, together with numerous Non-Resident, Honorary and Foreign Members. The Members’ Assembly appoints the Chairman and the Academic Council for their 4-years mandate.

The Ateneo Veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti was founded on 12 January 1812 by decree of Napoleon I, which merged the Società Veneta di medicina, the Accademia dei Filareti, and the Accademia Veneta letteraria. The first Chairman was the prominent art historian Leopoldo Cicognara.

Throughout the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries the Ateneo served as a forum for debates on crucial matters for the City of Venice in the fields of culture, science, art, literature, medicine, politics, economics and law. Such free discussions on significant issues have continued to characterize the institution, testifying its civic, social and cultural role.

Originally, the building hosted the Scuola di Santa Maria e di San Girolamo During the Sixteenth Century various great architects, painters and sculptors of the Baroque and Mannerist schools embarked upon a major reconstruction of the Scuola; by the beginning of the Seventeenth Century the building’s elements appeared as to date.

On the top floor is the library, which contains around 40,000 volumes, some of them of inestimable historic and artistic value. The art-collection, with works by Tintoretto, Veronese, Palma il Giovane, Zanchi, Fontebasso, Longhi and Vittoria, is also extremely valuable.

The Ateneo Veneto, a non-profit organization, is committed to making full use of its historical and artistic heritage (the building, the art-collection and the library) and to the pursuit of cultural activities, contributing to the City’s life, culture, education, with the ambition of updating and innovating its services and facilities.

The Botanical Garden of Padova

The Botanical Garden of Padova is the world’s oldest university garden of its kind and was founded so that students could research and recognise medicinal plants, known as “simples”. Its specimens are divided by category in beds organised into geometric shapes that represent an ideal and ordered catalogue of the plant kingdom. Themed collections (medicinal plants, poisonous plants, rare Triveneto plants, and Euganean Hills flora) and reconstructions of natural environments (an Alpine rockery and Mediterranean maquis) are exhibited alongside centuries-old trees, including “Goethe’s Palm”, the oldest plant in the Garden.
The motivation given by the World Heritage Committee for inscribing the Botanical Garden of Padova on the list of its sites, in 1997, described it as follows: “It is the origin of all the botanical gardens in the world, a cradle of science and scientific exchange, serving as the basis for the understanding of the relationship between nature and culture. It largely contributed to the progress of a number of modern scientific fields, the likes of which include, of course, botanicals, as well as medicine, chemistry, ecology and pharmaceuticals”.
The Garden’s new greenhouses, which run on solar- and water-power, take the visitor on a journey through the Earth’s climate zones and recount how plants have adapted to their various habitats. The itinerary encompasses five biomes: a tropical rainforest, a sub-humid tropical rainforest, and temperate, Mediterranean and arid regions.

Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia

The Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia manages and promotes a museum system composed by 11 Museums with over 40,000 square metres of exhibition space, over 200,000 works of art and 2,000,000 natural history specimens in the collections, and more than 2 million visitors every year. This system not only promotes the traditional proposals of any museum network (display, conservation, study), but also fosters an outstanding body of cultural services articulated in different aspects and themes: research, training and communication.

The Natural History Museum is one of the 11 venues managed by the Fondazione; it was set up in 1923 to house the most important scientific collections of that time. Over time, this material was added to make up the present rich, varied and fragile collection that spans 700 million years, with 2 million finds, zoological, entomological and botanical collections, fossils, as well as ethnographic collections and a library with over 40 thousand volumes.

The museum’s permanent exhibit was completely renovated between 2011 and 2012 with a new captivating set-up, which mediate the complexity of scientific content through a highly scenographic display and simple communication.

The Museum is primarily a scientific research organization, recognized by the Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca. Thanks to its important scientific collections, to a big scientific library and to the expertise of the staff, the Museum carries out systematic research in the field of biology and ecology of the Lagoon of Venice and local environment.”

Ca Foscari Science Campus

Ca Foscari’s origins lie in the heart of the Venetian lagoon, in a sixteenth century palace on the Grand Canal and the other prestigious buildings of the historic city. Along the strip of land that connects the islands to the mainland, we now find a modern architectural complex of recent construction. It is in this way that Ca’ Foscari University has expanded its roots towards Mestre, the other half of the city of Venice in an area full of developmental promise connected to major thoroughfares and not far from the Port and the industrial area of Porto Marghera. The new complex represents an investment in the growth of the University and a new learning structure: in the lagoon, we can find the seats of Economics, Linguistics and Humanities and, on the mainland, the Sciences and Technologies.

Sciences at Ca’ Foscari is organised in two Departments: the Department of Environmental, Statistics and Computer Sciences and the Department of Molecular Sciences and Nanosystems. One of the first objectives of the Science Campus was to turn it into a modern and well-equipped university citadel that is open to the community. What we see today is a Campus building complex consisting of four aboveground buildings (Alfa, Beta, Gamma, and Delta) and by two belowground sectors. Construction of a further and fifth building (Epsilon) will be shortly underway.

Recent project approval and co-funding by the Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca (Ministry for Education, Higher Education and Research) will soon see the construction of a student residential area.