Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies
Sant'Anna was formally established in 1987, uniting an older postgraduate school descended from the Scuola Normale's original medical and legal college with the Sant'Anna convent, from which it takes its name and seat. It was explicitly modelled on the Normale but built around applied sciences rather than pure humanities and sciences.
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- Pisa
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Its programmes span biorobotics, communication and information technologies, life sciences, economics and management, and law, politics, and development — a genuinely distinct focus from the Normale's more classical range. Like the Normale, admission runs through a separate, highly competitive written-and-oral entrance exam held at Pisa's Porta Nuova teaching centre, on top of a regular University of Pisa degree, for a very small honours cohort each year.
It's one of only a handful of Italian "special-statute" public universities — a small, research-intensive institution rather than a broad-intake degree provider — with a strong emphasis on international Master's and PhD programmes specifically.
Because Sant'Anna students are also University of Pisa students, our general guidance on living and studying in Pisa — housing, arrival, settling in — applies here too, alongside the guided application process for the exam itself.
See the Pisa city guide for what living and studying in the city looks like beyond the university itself.
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