La Sapienza in Rome is ranked among world’s top 150 universities for fourth year in a row.
Rome’s Università La Sapienza is the top university in Italy according to the 2025 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) of Shanghai Ranking Consultancy, a prestigious independent research organisation on higher education.
La Sapienza is the only Italian university to be ranked in the 101-150 range, making it one of the top 150 universities in the world in the 2025 ARWU rankings.
“For the fourth consecutive time, Sapienza confirms the prestige it has earned over the years in the international university landscape,” rector Antonella Polimeni stated, crediting “the variety of disciplinary fields and the excellence of research activities” as “the driving forces behind Sapienza’s excellent performance”.
In terms of Italian universities, after La Sapienza comes the University of Milan and the University of Padua, both in the 151-200 ranking; Pisa is in the 201-300 ranking alongside Bologna, Turin and Naples Federico II, while the Polytecnico in Milan is in the 301-400 ranking.
Launched in 2003, ARWU ranks 2,500 universities – out of a global total of around 18,000 – publishing the top 1,000.
World universities are ranked using criteria such as the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of highly-cited researchers, and per capita academic performance.
The world’s top three universities in 2025 according to ARWU are once again Harvard, Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Earlier this year La Sapienza was rated the top university in the world for Classical Studies and Ancient History, for the fifth year in a row, in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings.
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