This essay takes readers on a microbiological tour of the key findings and research endeavors of academics that have studied or taught in this area at Padova University over the course of its eight-hundred-year history. The ancient practice of variolization, the alleged Legnaro miracle, and the pellagra controversy, whose observations and investigations were driven at Padova even before microbiology was established as a scientific discipline, along with the contemporary research activities in the fields of agricultural, environmental, and food microbiology, undoubtedly suggest the hallmark and everyday role played by microbes in overwhelmingly global but profoundly human adventures.
