Padua

Padua is where the smart money lives while everyone else fights for a room in Venice. It sits just twenty-five minutes down the rail line from the lagoon, and it is everything Venice is not: affordable, practical, flat, bikeable, and full of actual working life rather than tourists. This is one of the oldest university cities in the world, where Galileo lectured and students have argued in the cafes for eight centuries. It has the brains, the beauty, and the prices that make a real life possible.