5 good reasons for studying and living in Italy
If you are looking to remove all doubts about your wish to study in Italy, read on, you are in the right place 😉.
1. Reasons to Study and Live in Italy: Public and Free Healthcare
In Italy, basic healthcare is free for everyone. If you have a sudden health problem or an accident, you are helped and treated free of charge by the National Health Service. For those who spend a period of study (even a short one) in Italy, it is possible to register with the health service and be entitled to treatment, diagnosis and benefits, like all Italians. Registration is annual and requires the payment of a small cash fee. In Italy, medical services, such as treatments, therapies, and examinations, are free of charge and only require payment of a fee (ticket), which is lowered in proportion to one's financial means.
2. Reasons to Study and Live in Italy: the 21 Nobel Prize Winners
A total of 21 Italians have been awarded the Nobel Prize, bearing witness to a country where ideas are always brewing and where critical and innovative thinking happens every day. The first winner was Giosuè Carducci, in 1906, for his poems. In literature, the other Nobel Prizes awarded to Italians went to Grazia Deledda (1926), Luigi Pirandello (1934), Salvatore Quasimodo (1959), Eugenio Montale (1975) and Dario Fo (1997). In the medical field, the awardees were Camillo Golgi (1906), Daniel Bovet (1957), Salvatore Luria (1969), Renato Dulbecco (1975), Rita Levi Montalcini (1986) and Mario Capecchi (2007). There are also six awards in the field of physics, starting in 1909 with Guglielmo Marconi, followed by Enrico Fermi (1938), Emilio Segrè (1959), Carlo Rubbia (1984), Riccardo Giacconi (2002) and the 2021 winner Giorgio Parisi. Nobel Prizes were also awarded in the fields of economics (Franco Modigliani, 1985), chemistry (Giulio Natta, 1963) and peace (Ernesto Teodoro Moneta, 1907).
3. Reasons to Study and Live in Italy: Universities
Italy has a thousand-years old tradition in university studies, suffice it to say that as early as 1088 the University of Bologna (Alma Mater Studiorum) was already open and the foundation of the legendary Scuola Medica Salernitana can be traced back to the year 1000. Knowledge, in general, is at home in Italy, the country where the first non-French edition of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie saw the light of day in 1758, and is still available for consultation in the Library of the National Institute for Renaissance Studies in Florence and the State Library in Lucca. In 2023 there will be 61 state universities in Italy offering approximately 5,000 degree courses. The life of university students in Italy is full of stimuli both at the academic level and work level thanks to the constant relationship between universities and companies that makes Italian education increasingly linked to the practical side of learning.
4. Reasons to Study and Live in Italy: Art
Italy is the treasure chest of beauty par excellence, permanently ranked number 1 in the Overall Best Countries Ranking for influence and cultural heritage. It is considered by many to be the place where more than half of the world's artistic heritage is located. The names of Italian art are simply... history: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raffaello Sanzio, Caravaggio, Giotto, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Botticelli. And literature follows suit with Dante Alighieri, Giacomo Leopardi, Alessandro Manzoni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino... And the same goes for music: Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppe Verdi, Antonio Vivaldi, Gioacchino Rossini... Italians have great names even in film and theatre, any examples? Eleonora Duse, Federico Fellini, Sophia Loren, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Bernardo Bertolucci.
Art in Italy is also everything contemporary: from the literary genius Elena Ferrante to the New Italian Dance movement, Rudolf Stingel's visual disruptiveness, Maurizio Cattelan's provocations, Stefano Bollani's sonic acrobatics and Luciano Berio's avant-garde drive.
In short, Italy and art go hand in hand and the almost 5,000 museums, some 1,400 theatres and several hundred music festivals scattered around the peninsula are proof of this. By the way, art also stimulates serotonin!
5. Reasons to Study and Live in Italy: the Italians
Friendly, creative, imaginative, and welcoming: everything they say about Italians is true! In this country, where there are more than 8,000 kilometres of coastline but also almost 6,000 km of ski slopes, life goes on at a more human pace. People in Italy smile, gesticulate, sing, get fired up about soccer, get emotional by telling stories, travel through the beauty of cities, countryside and towns and then get together to eat 3 billion pizzas a year and toast with beers, chianti, pinot and negroamaro.
Such a place is unique and not living there would be a shame!
