Padova in WW2

People from time to time get upset when they are pulled up and fined for not having 'validated' - date stamped - their tickets on public transport. Elderly British visitors to Padova upset that they had been to the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery and were fined on the way back. Some messages of the unfairness given the circumstance. I felt obliged to write about what the people of Padova themselves went through in WW2.

For perspective. There were Italians in Padova in WW2. This provides a rough translation of one story of the aerial bombardment of the city
https://translate.google.com/translate… 

And here a translated extract from wikipedia
Quote begins:
World War II and the Resistance
The Second World War was also for Padua, bearer of death and devastation, with the loss of the priceless paintings of the Ovetari Chapel of the Church of the Eremitani , of Andrea Mantegna and of Ansuino da Forlì , during an American air raid on March 11, 1944 : only fragments remain. The fate for the frescoes of the Cappella del Podestà, made by Filippo Lippi , Niccolò Pizzolo and, again, Ansuino da Forlì, was the same.
Many university students and teachers were protagonists of the partisan struggle . Important was the speech of the rector Marchesi Concept on 9 November 1943 for the inauguration of the academic year in which he invited students to take up arms against the Italian Social Republic , in the name of the Universa Universis Patavina Libertas (the University's motto).
Palazzo della Ragione

Padua was the headquarters of the Veneto Regional Command of the Resistance, the CLN coordination center for the whole of Veneto . It was this Command that gave the order for the attack of April 26, 1945 . The partisans took control of the bridges on the Brenta to block the movements of the Xª Flottiglia MAS Republican coming from Salboro who attacked with the artillery the city causing victims both among civilians and between the Germans and the forces of the Italian Social Republic . On April 27th, towards the evening, the RSI forces surrendered, followed in the night by the German troops of the twenty-sixth division . At the end of the insurrection among the partisans of Padua there were 224 fallen and almost as many wounded, while the forces of the Italian Social Republic and the Wehrmacht counted about 500 dead and around 20,000 prisoners.
The University of Padua was the only Italian university awarded with the Military Valor gold medal for merit during the Resistance .
...quote ends 

Important not to regard Padovans as extraneous extras on the stage. You cannot wander into a foreign country unprepared for local rules.
I lost two great uncles in WW1 on the Western Front. One never found in the mud after buried by a comrade. Were I to go to France to find some plaques, I would not imagine that I did not need to know how to travel in France. My age, 74, makes no difference.