Medicine: nearly 5,000 applicants are aiming for La Sapienza, but there are only 1,918 places

At Sapienza University of Rome, everything is ready to welcome the 4,238 students enrolled on the open-enrolment Medicine programme, which officially begins today with the start of lectures in the three core subjects of Biology, Chemistry and Physics.

Once again this year, therefore, Rome’s mega-university has proved to be the most popular choice amongst aspiring doctors, ahead of Naples’ Federico II with 2,752 students and Padua with 2,535. If we shift our focus from the place of enrolment to analyse the possible first choices for matriculation – which have now been separated to allow students, if they wish, to attend courses at a local university and then transfer to another for the second semester, editor’s note – the top three remain unchanged.

But this is not always the case. You only need to look at the table on this page to realise this. Apart from Milano Statale, which is fourth in both rankings, from fifth place downwards there are some changes. Whilst Bari ranks fifth in terms of enrolments (2,284 students), for first-choice institutions Bologna (eighth in terms of enrolments). The same applies to Turin, which drops from sixth to seventh place in terms of enrolments. There’s also a change in tenth place, with Rome’s Tor Vergata overtaking the Luigi Vanvitelli campus in the south of Italy.

Knowing the ranking of the most sought-after universities also allows you to gauge which universities are likely to offer the smoothest path to admission and which the most challenging. It should be noted, however, that the national ranking will not be published until 22 January and will be drawn up on the basis of the marks obtained in the two national examination sessions for Biology, Chemistry and Physics – scheduled for 10 December and 11 January – at least on paper, the most favourable ratio of available places to first-choice applications is at Tor Vergata (53.1 per cent), which has 580 places available for the screening semester, ahead of Palermo (41.5 per cent), which offers 822 places, and Sapienza University of Rome (38.6 per cent), which has 1,918 places available. Conversely, the path starts off slightly uphill in Padua and Bari, where the ratio of places to first-choice applications stands at 20.7 per cent and 21 per cent respectively.

It should be noted that individual universities have independently determined the delivery methods and timetables for their lectures, whilst adhering to the start and end dates set by the Ministry of Universities (1 September–30 November) and that – as we have reported on several occasions in *Il Sole 24 Ore* – the places available for the 52,303 students enrolled in the ‘filter’ semester amount to 18,830 out of a total of 27,001 for the 2026/27 academic year, it should also be noted that, from today, the first set of exercises for students will be available on the CISIA consortium’s platform (at https://www.semestreaperto-medodovet.it/). These will be released progressively for the various teaching modules in line with the progression of the ‘filter’ semester courses (the syllabus for each subject comprises seven teaching modules).