The presence of the University was of specific importance for the introduction of new ideas from beyond the Alps during the Eighteenth Century and a short time prior to the fall of the Venetian Republic: the Paduan nobility at first was favourable to the French, who, in Apri11797, occupied the city though ceding it to Austria with the Treaty of Campoformido. Back under the French for a short time it was included in the Kingdom of Italy, and Padua became definitely Austrian in 1813 remaining thus unti11866. In 1848, during the riots of the Risorgimento, the insurrection of the famous Pedrocchi Cafe: the period of freedom lasted only a few months. The fall of the Venetian Republic, the succession of the French and the Austrians caused a serious dispersion of the city's artistic patrimony, culminating in the demolition of ancient monastic and ecclesiastical buildings: episodes to which there is no corresponding analogous renewal, if one excludes the work ofGiuseppe Jappelli. The city also felt the crisis economically, due to the type of activity, which was mainly agricultural, and only starting from the second quarter of the Nineteenth Century did it reemerge in artisan and commercial forms, while a contractual executive class started which flanked the landed nobility. The linking of the city with Venice and Verona, by means of the railway, was one of the motives for its economic development, based on commerce and business: expansion beyond the sixteenth-century walls began, which caused the formation of a concentrated urban periphery.
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