La Sapienza is 125th in the world in CWUR university rankings.
Rome’s La Sapienza is the top university in Italy according to the 2025 ranking by the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR), a leading consulting organisation and publisher of the largest academic ranking of global universities.
The rankings, released on Monday, show that La Sapienza is in 41st place at a European level (unchanged since 2024) and 125th position in the world (down one place since last year) out of the more than 21,000 higher education institutes surveyed.
CWUR rates world universities based on criteria including quality of education, alumni employment, quality of faculty, and research performance.
The top five in the 2025 worldwide rankings are Harvard University in first place, followed by MIT in Boston, Stanford University, Cambridge, and Oxford.
In Italy, the University of Padua is second after La Sapienza in 178th place, followed by the University of Milan (191), the University of Bologna (204) and the University of Turin (242).
The news comes a couple of months after La Sapienza confirmed its position as the top university in the world for Classical Studies and Ancient History in the 2025 edition of the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings, for the fifth year in a row.
One of the oldest universities in the world, La Sapienza was founded by Pope Boniface VIII in 1303. It is also the largest university in Europe, with a student population of more than 120,000.
For CWUR international university rankings for 2025 see official website.
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