This easy excursion starts from the Porte Contarine and shortly after reaches the Scrovegni chapel, a treasure chest that preserves Giotto's precious frescoes. The first waterway you meet is the Piovego canal, an artificial artery that has connected Padua to Venice for eight hundred years through the Brenta canal.
In the first section, the route skirts the Venetian walls and near the lively university district meets the Porta Ognissanti. Leaving the sixteenth-century walls, you proceed against the current of the waterway, first along the San Gregorio canal and then, after passing the Voltabarozzo navigation basin, along the Scaricatore canal. The route continues along the left bank of the Bacchiglione and then along the Brentella canal, up to Limena, where you can admire some villas and the ancient Colmelloni hydraulic exit. At this point the route intercepts the Brenta river. Arriving near a centuries-old oak, you turn off onto a country road that leads to the entrance to the former Charterhouse of Vigodarzere, a vast monastic complex from the sixteenth century.
Continuing, the course of the river becomes straight and less captivating, but after a few kilometers you reach Stra, a coastal town where famous Venetian villas such as Villa Pisani, a national monument, are situated. In the last stretch, from Noventa to Padua you cycle again along the Piovego canal, where Villa Giovannelli overlooks, the last stop before returning to the city.
