Scuola Normale Superiore

It's one of Italy's most prestigious institutions by a simple measure: it admits an extremely small cohort each year, purely on the strength of a famously difficult written-and-oral competitive exam, open to Italian and international applicants alike on equal terms — there's no separate "international students" admissions track, because everyone sits the same exam. Admitted students also enrol in a regular degree at the University of Pisa, effectively completing two courses of study at once.

It's publicly funded and charges no tuition, spans both humanities and sciences, and historically trained secondary- and university-level teachers — "normale" here refers to setting educational norms, not to being ordinary. This is a genuinely different admissions model from every other university on this site, and one worth being realistic about: it's a tiny, extremely selective cohort, not a typical broad-intake degree.

Because Normale 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.