University of Pisa

It's home to Europe's oldest surviving academic botanical garden, founded in 1544, and to the Calcolatrice Elettronica Pisana — one of Italy's first computers, built here in the 1960s, around the same time Pisa hosted the country's first internet connection. It's a large, comprehensive public university, and also the institution both the Scuola Normale Superiore and Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies work alongside: their honours students complete a regular Pisa degree in parallel with their own smaller, more selective programme.

As with our shorter-form cities, our deepest, most detailed on-the-ground support currently stays in Turin and Milan — we don't yet have the same neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood rent data or a vetted-rooms network here, and we'd rather say so plainly than pad this page with figures we haven't checked.

Admission for international students generally runs through the standard route: Universitaly pre-enrolment, a Declaration of Value or CIMEA comparability statement for your prior qualification, and — depending on faculty — an entrance test or a language requirement if you're studying in Italian.

See the Pisa city guide for what living and studying in the city looks like beyond the university itself.