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History of the University of Pisa
From the year 1000 on, Pisa's cultural vitality in the Middle Ages is attested by its relationships with the Islamic and Byzantine worlds and by the emergence of personalities of the level of Buscheto, Burgundio and Leonardo Fibonacci. The University of Pisa was officially founded in 1334 by a Papal edict, although there had long been teachers in the city. The Faculties first founded were Theology, Civil and Canon Law and Medicine.
The life of the University has always been closely linked to that of the city. In the Fifteenth Century, for instance, when Florence subjugated Pisa, the University underwent a period of decline. The advent of Lorenzo de'Medici witnessed a revival of interest, but Pisa's subsequent rebellion in 1494, war with Florence and the siege of 1509 stripped the University of all its resources.
Only under the Grand Duke Cosimo I did the University, restored and reorganized, finally attain its status as one of the preeminent cultural and teaching centres in Europe, a position it held for at least the following century: many of the greatest minds of the time worked alongside the universally renowned figure of Galileo Galilei. During this period, the botanist Luca Ghini established what are now among the world's oldest botanical gardens (a distinction Pisa shares with Padua).
After the splendid progress of these years, the University underwent a few decades of relative quiescence, and then, in the second half of the Eighteenth Century, there was a revival of interest on the part of the new Hapsburg-Lorraine Grand Dukes, who expanded the University's libraries and museums, created an Observatory, instituted Chairs in Physics and Chemistry, and reestablished the previously suspended teaching of Surgery.
The subsequent Napoleonic period saw the further addition of new Chairs, and the foundation of the Scuola Normale Superiore.
The early 1800s also witnessed the birth of the new Faculties of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, In 1848, a battalion of University volunteers took part in the battle of Curtatone. This episode of the Austro-Hungarian war lies at the origin of the traditional "goliardi", or caps with the peak cut off, worn by the University students.
The University has continued to maintain a high reputation in the world of studies, and boasts two Nobel prize winners, Fermi and Rubbia, Fermi and Rubbia, among its former students.
In the sixties a new university institution, the Scuola Superiore di Studi "Sant'Anna", was established, and during the same period the University strengthened its ties with the National Research Council (CNR), whose Pisa branch is one of the nation's most important.
The years of student unrest, in the late sixties and early seventies, which so deeply affected the universities and societies of many countries of the world, saw a clear confirmation of the vitality and the spirit of renewal of the University population of Pisa.
Since 1984, Pisa has been able to run the only university-run Conference Hall in Italy. The students -- nearly forty thousand strong in a city of only one hundred thousand inhabitants, are drawn to Pisa, not only from the nearby Tuscan and Ligurian coasts, but from many other regions as well, especially the south of Italy. A growing number arrive from other European, American, African and Asiatic nations as well.
Since medieval times, when the bells in the tower near the Sapienza building rang out when classes started in the early morning, the academic world has been a vital part of city life.
