A papal wine tax helped fund Rome's Sapienza, now Europe's largest university
In 1431 Pope Eugene IV reorganised Rome's university and levied a new tax on wine to pay for it. The proceeds bought a palace that later held the church of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza. The school he rebuilt, founded by papal bull in 1303, now enrols over 110,000 students.
Pope Boniface VIII created it on 20 April 1303 as a studium for church studies, deliberately more under papal control than the independent universities of Bologna and Padua, which made it the first pontifical university. Eugene IV's bull of 1431 granted masters and students sweeping privileges and set out four schools: law, medicine, philosophy and theology. The sack of Rome in 1527 shut it down and scattered its teachers, until Paul III revived it after becoming pope in 1534.
The name Sapienza, wisdom, attached itself in the 1650s. Pope Alexander VII built the Alessandrina library in 1667; it now holds 1.5 million volumes. In 1703 Clement XI used his own money to buy land on the Janiculum for a botanical garden that became Europe's most celebrated. After Italian forces captured Rome in 1870, it stopped being the pope's university and became the capital's, and in 1935 Marcello Piacentini's new campus, the Città Universitaria covering 44 hectares, was completed.
Its roster of teachers is formidable. Enrico Fermi held the chair of theoretical physics from 1926 to 1938, the year he won the Nobel Prize; Emilio Segrè also taught physics there, and Guglielmo Marconi lectured on electromagnetic waves in the mid-1930s. Giorgio Parisi, the 2021 physics laureate, held a chair from 1992 to 2018. Alumni include economist Franco Modigliani, who took a law degree in 1939, and Italian president Sergio Mattarella. QS ranks it first in the world for classics and ancient history.
Its papal past still stirs feelings. On 15 January 2008 the Vatican called off a visit by Pope Benedict XVI, who was to open the academic year, after some students and professors protested a 1990 speech in which, they argued, he had defended the church's actions against Galileo in 1633.
Source: Sapienza University of Rome
