Padua

Padua is the educational turning point in the tale of Stefan Zannovich: his father sends his sons there so they can begin life with opportunities he never had, while Stefan makes the city part of the cultivated identity he later performs abroad.

Education as a Father's Investment

In recalling his own years as a hawker in Albania, Stefan’s father describes a life shaped by poverty, exhaustion, and missed opportunities. He had spent twenty years trading with peasants and blamed his own failure to advance on not having applied his intelligence elsewhere. Sending his sons to college in Padua, with coach and horses for the journey, is his attempt to spare them that fate. He urges them to remember the sorrow endured by their parents and the hardship of their childhood, including nights spent together in the forest. Padua thus represents not simply schooling but the father's effort to convert his own deprivation into a better beginning for the next generation.

Stefan's Education Beyond the Classroom

Stefan arrives in Padua as a young man of about twenty, already quick-tongued and socially agile. The account distinguishes his education from that of the nobility: while noblemen learn from professors, Stefan learns from noblemen. His schooling is presented as social observation and imitation as much as formal study. He acquires the ease of manner that lets him charm women and move smoothly among men, gaining access to ways of speaking and behaving that his father’s life as a hawker had not afforded him.

Padua as a Portable Identity

When Stefan returns to Albania, his father sees him as a man of the world, already twenty years ahead of his own younger self. Stefan’s later journeys extend that transformation. In Montenegro he travels with coaches, horses, and servants, and is addressed as a count and a prince. Because others would not believe that his father was a villager from Pastrovich, Stefan presents himself as a nobleman from Padua; elsewhere he passes himself off as a wealthy Pole and Baron Warta. Padua’s importance in the story therefore lies both in the education Stefan receives there and in the identity he carries away: the city supplies a credible social origin for a self-fashioned gentleman.