100 Notable alumni of University of Pisa

Luigi Bianchi was an Italian mathematician. He was born in Parma, Emilia-Romagna, and died in Pisa. He was a leading member of the vigorous geometric school which flourished in Italy during the later years of the 19th century and the early years of the twentieth century.

Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane the Younger was a Florentine poet, librettist and man of letters, known as "the Younger" to distinguish him from his granduncle, Michelangelo.

Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi was an Italian writer and politician involved in the Italian Risorgimento.

Francesco Merloni was an Italian industrialist, engineer and politician who was a member of the Christian Democrats. He served as the minister of public works from 1992 to 1994. He chaired Merloni Termosanitari until 2011.

Tilemachos Chytiris is a Greek politician from the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) who has served as member of Parliament and minister. He has also published poetry collections.

Pasquale Villari was an Italian historian and politician.

Leopoldo Franchetti was an Italian publicist, politician, and patron. He was a deputy in the Italian Chamber of Deputies and later became a Senator. He was very active in promoting education and concrete solutions for economic, social and political problems in Italy both through his own political initiatives and through his support of his wife Alice Hallgarten.

Cosimo Maria Ferri is an Italian politician and former magistrate. He served as the Undersecretary of State for Justice in the Letta government, the Renzi government, and the Gentiloni government. Since 2018, he has been a member of the Italian Parliament as a deputy for the Democratic Party, and from September 2019, he has represented Italia Viva. He also previously...

Luciano Tovoli ASC AIC is an Italian cinematographer and filmmaker. With a career spanning over five decades, he is considered one of Italy's premier cinematographers, collaborating with numerous acclaimed filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Francis Veber, Dario Argento, Ettore Scola, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Julie Taymor.

Michele Conti is an Italian politician, who is currently serving as the Mayor of Pisa since May 2018.

Gianni Lancia was an Italian automobile engineer, industrialist and racing enthusiast, known for running the Lancia carmaker in Turin (1949–55). Born in Fobello (near Biella), he was the older son of Vincenzo Lancia and Adele Miglietti, and brother of Anna Maria and Eleonora.

Enrico Betti Glaoui was an Italian mathematician, now remembered mostly for his 1871 paper on topology that led to the later naming after him of the Betti numbers. He worked also on the theory of equations, giving early expositions of Galois theory. He also discovered Betti's theorem, a result in the theory of elasticity.

Abramo Giulio Umberto Federigo Enriques was an Italian mathematician, now known principally as the first to give a classification of algebraic surfaces in birational geometry, and other contributions in algebraic geometry.

Daniele Meucci is an Italian athlete who specialises in long-distance running, including track running, cross country and road running who won twenty medals at international level (seventeen at senior level and three at youth level).

Ulisse Dini was an Italian mathematician and politician, born in Pisa. He is known for his contributions to real analysis, partly collected in his book "Fondamenti per la teorica delle funzioni di variabili reali".

Francesco Barberini was an Italian Catholic Cardinal. The nephew of Pope Urban VIII (reigned 1623–1644), he benefited immensely from the nepotism practiced by his uncle. He was given various roles within the Vatican administration but his personal cultural interests, particularly in literature and the arts, meant that he became a highly significant patron. His secretary was the antiquarian Cassiano dal...

Guglielmo Ferrero was an Italian historian, journalist and novelist, author of the Greatness and Decline of Rome (5 volumes, published after English translation 1907–1909) and The Gamble: Bonaparte in Italy, 1796-1797. Ferrero devoted his writings to classical liberalism, and he opposed any kind of dictatorship and unlimited government.

Filippo Nogarin is an Italian politician.

Theophilos Kairis was a Greek priest, philosopher and revolutionary. He was born in Andros, Cyclades, Ottoman Greece, as a son of a distinguished family.

Giovanni Battista Guarini was an Italian poet, dramatist, and diplomat. Courtier at Ferrara, diplomat and secretary to several ruling families, he served also at Florence and Urbino. He is best known as the author of the pastoral tragicomedy Il pastor fido. Written in emulation of Tasso's Aminta, it was extremely successful and remained one of the most popular work of...

Antoine Christophe Saliceti was a French politician and diplomat of the Revolution and First Empire.

Guido Tonelli is an Italian particle physicist who was involved with the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. He is a professor of General Physics at the University of Pisa (Italy) and a CERN visiting scientist.

Remo Bodei was an Italian philosopher. He was a professor of the history of philosophy at University of California, Los Angeles, and also taught at the University of Pisa and Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Bodei was born in Cagliari. His initial interests were in classical German philosophy, and the Weimar Classicism period (1770–1830). He subsequently penned over 200 papers...

Elio Toaff was the Chief Rabbi of Rome from 1951 to 2002. He served as a rabbi in Venice from 1947, and in 1951 became the Chief Rabbi of Rome.

Andrea Cesalpino was a Florentine physician, philosopher and botanist.

Alfredo Biondi was an Italian politician and lawyer. In 1994 he served as Minister of Justice of the Italian Republic during the first cabinet chaired by Silvio Berlusconi.

Silvia Ronchey is an Italian writer and Byzantine historian. She is Professor of Byzantine Civilisation in the Department of Humanistic Studies at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre. She has written for the newspaper La Repubblica.

Count Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo was a Corsican politician, who later became a Russian diplomat.

Raffaele Sansoni Galeoti Riario was an Italian cardinal of the Renaissance, mainly known as the constructor of the Palazzo della Cancelleria and the person who invited Michelangelo to Rome. He was a patron of the arts. He was also the first adolescent to be elevated in the College of Cardinals in the history of the Holy See.

Vincenzo Viviani was an Italian mathematician and scientist. He was a pupil of Torricelli and Galileo.

Franco Piperno was an Italian communist militant. He was an associate professor of Condensed Matter Physics in the University of Calabria.

Pietro Gori was an Italian lawyer, journalist, poet and anarchist activist.

Roan Occam Anthony Johnson is an Italian director and screenwriter.

Enrico Rossi is an Italian politician and former President of Tuscany.

Stefania Giannini is an Italian politician and linguist. She served as Minister of Education, Universities and Research from 2014 until 2016. She is currently Assistant-Director General for Education at UNESCO in Paris.

Sandro Bondi is an Italian politician. He served as minister of culture from 2008 to 2011 in the fourth Berlusconi government.

Filippo Giuseppe Maria Ludovico Buonarroti, more usually referred to by the French version Philippe Buonarroti, was an Italian-French utopian socialist, writer, agitator, freemason, and conspirator. He was active in Corsica, France, and Geneva. His History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals (1828) became a quintessential text for revolutionaries, inspiring such socialists as Louis Auguste Blanqui and Karl Marx. He proposed a...

Andrea Marcucci is an Italian politician.

Guido Buffarini Guidi was an Italian army officer and politician, and was executed for war atrocities during the Italian Civil War in 1945.

Giotto Bizzarrini was an Italian automobile engineer who was active from the 1950s through the 1970s.

Marcello Pera is an Italian philosopher and politician. He was the president of the Italian Senate from 2001 to 2006.

Ioannis Kolettis was a Greek politician who played a significant role in Greek affairs from the Greek War of Independence through the early years of the Greek Kingdom, including as Minister to France and serving twice as Prime Minister. Kolettis is credited with conceiving the Byzantine restorationist and irredentist Megali Idea or "Great Idea" which became the core of Greek...

Bonaventura Francesco Cavalieri was an Italian mathematician and a Jesuate. He is known for his work on the problems of optics and motion, work on indivisibles, the precursors of infinitesimal calculus, and the introduction of logarithms to Italy. Cavalieri's principle in geometry partially anticipated integral calculus.

Count Carlo Sforza was an Italian nobleman, diplomat and anti-fascist politician.

Franco Gabrielli is an Italian police officer, prefect and civil servant. He has been director of SISDE (the civil intelligence service) and prefect of L'Aquila. In November 2010, he was named chief of the Italian Protezione Civile, an office he held until 2015. In 2016, Gabrielli was named chief of the State Police, holding the office until 2021.

Andrea Romano is an Italian politician.

Piero Calamandrei was an Italian author, jurist, soldier, university professor, and politician. He was one of Italy's leading authorities on the law of civil procedure.

Pope Clement IX, born Giulio Rospigliosi, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 20 June 1667 to his death in December 1669.

Marco Malvaldi is an Italian crime writer.

Sidney Costantino, Baron Sonnino was an Italian statesman, 19th prime minister of Italy and twice served briefly as one, in 1906 and again from 1909 to 1910. He also was the Italian minister of Foreign Affairs during the First World War, representing Italy at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

Alessandra Todde is an Italian politician who is the current President of Sardinia, the first woman to hold the office. Prior to her tenure as president she was a member of the Chamber of Deputies from 2022 to 2024, and vice president of the Five Star Movement (M5S) from 2021 to 2023. She held positions within the Second Conte and...

Bruno Pontecorvo was an Italian–Russian nuclear physicist, an early assistant of Enrico Fermi and the author of numerous studies in high energy physics, especially on neutrinos. A convinced communist, he defected to the Soviet Union in 1950, where he continued his research on the decay of the muon and on neutrinos. The prestigious Pontecorvo Prize was instituted in his memory...

Concita De Gregorio is an Italian journalist, writer, radio and television presenter, and commentator. She is an editorial columnist at la Repubblica and was editor-in-chief of l'Unità from 2008 to 2011.

Antonio Pacinotti was an Italian physicist, who was Professor of Physics at the University of Pisa.

Giovanni Gronchi was an Italian politician from Christian Democracy who served as the president of Italy from 1955 to 1962 and was marked by a controversial and failed attempt to bring about an "opening to the left" in Italian politics. He was reputed the real holder of the executive power in Italy from 1955 to 1962, behind the various Prime...

Carlo Ginzburg is an Italian historian and a proponent of the field of microhistory. He is best known for Il formaggio e i vermi (1976, English title: The Cheese and the Worms), which examined the beliefs of an Italian heretic, Menocchio, from Montereale Valcellina.

Nicola Fratoianni is an Italian politician, member of the Chamber of Deputies, secretary of Italian Left from 2017 to 2019 and again since 2021, and co-leader of Greens and Left Alliance.

Mario Alberto Ettore Monicelli was an Italian film director and screenwriter.

Massimo D'Alema is an Italian politician and journalist who was the 53rd prime minister of Italy from 1998 to 2000. He was Deputy Prime Minister of Italy and Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2006 to 2008. D'Alema also served for a time as national secretary of the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS). Earlier in his career, D'Alema was...

Umberto Saba was an Italian poet and novelist, born Umberto Poli in the cosmopolitan Mediterranean port of Trieste when it was the fourth largest city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Poli assumed the pen name "Saba" in 1910, and his name was officially changed to Umberto Saba in 1928. From 1919 he was the proprietor of an antiquarian bookshop in Trieste....

Carlo Azeglio Ciampi OMRI was an Italian politician, statesman and banker who was the president of Italy from 1999 to 2006 and prime minister of Italy from 1993 to 1994.

Francesca Paola Albanese is an Italian legal scholar and expert on human rights, who has served as the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories since 1 May 2022; initially appointed for a three-year term, Albanese was confirmed for another three years in April 2025. She is the first woman to hold the position.

Francesco Redi was an Italian physician, naturalist, biologist, and poet. He is referred to as the "founder of experimental biology", and as the "father of modern parasitology". He was the first person to challenge the theory of spontaneous generation by demonstrating that maggots come from eggs of flies.

Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei, commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei or mononymously as Galileo, was an Italian astronomer, physicist, and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. He was born in the city of Pisa, then part of the Duchy of Florence. Galileo has been called the father of observational astronomy, modern-era classical physics, the scientific method, and modern...

Andrea Bocelli is an Italian tenor. He rose to fame in 1994 after winning the newcomers' section of the 44th Sanremo Music Festival performing "Il mare calmo della sera".

Pope Leo X was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 9 March 1513 to his death in December 1521.

Pope Paul III was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 13 October 1534 to his death, in November 1549.

François Carlo Antommarchi was Napoleon's physician from 1819 to his death in 1821.

Alfonso Bonafede is an Italian lawyer and politician who has served as the Italian Minister of Justice since 1 June 2018. A lawyer by profession, Bonafede has also served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies from 15 March 2013 until 12 October 2022.

Marsilio Ficino was an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance. He was an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism in touch with the major academics of his day, and the first translator of Plato's complete extant works into Latin. His Florentine Academy, an attempt to revive Plato's Academy,...

Pellegrino Luigi Odoardo Rossi was an Italian economist, politician and jurist. He was an important figure of the July Monarchy in France, and the minister of justice in the government of the Papal States, under Pope Pius IX.

Lucia Azzolina is an Italian politician and teacher. She was the Minister of Education during the Conte II Cabinet.

Cesare Borgia was an Italian cardinal deacon and later a condottiero, as well as a member of the Spanish House of Borgia. He was the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI and sibling to Lucrezia Borgia.

Alessandro Tassoni was an Italian poet and writer, from Modena, best known as the author of the mock-heroic poem La secchia rapita (The Rape of the Bucket, literally The stolen bucket).

Gioacchino Volpe was an Italian historian and, during the years between the two world wars, a politician.

Camillo De Lellis is an Italian mathematician who is active in the fields of calculus of variations, hyperbolic systems of conservation laws, geometric measure theory and fluid dynamics. He is a permanent faculty member in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was also one of the two managing editors of Inventiones Mathematicae.

Luigi Ambrosio is a professor at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. His main fields of research are the calculus of variations and geometric measure theory.

Alessandro Natta was an Italian politician and secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1984 to 1988. An illuminist, Jacobin, and communist, as he used to describe himself, Natta represented the political and cultural prototype of a PCI militant and party member for over fifty years of the Italian democratic-republican history. After joining the PCI in 1945, he was...

Luciano Bianciardi was an Italian writer, journalist, translator and librarian.

Paolo Emilio Taviani was an Italian political leader, economist, and historian of the career of Christopher Columbus. He was a partisan leader in Liguria, a Gold Medal of the Italian resistance movement, then a member of the Consulta (the national assembly gathered to direct the transformation of the monarchy into a republic) and the Constituent Assembly, later of the Italian...

Salvatore Settis is an Italian archaeologist and art historian. From 1994 to 1999 he was director of the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Los Angeles and from 1999 to 2010 of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

Franco Dino Rasetti was an Italian (later naturalized American) physicist, paleontologist and botanist. Together with Enrico Fermi, he discovered key processes leading to nuclear fission. Rasetti refused to work on the Manhattan Project on moral grounds.

Fabio Mussi is an Italian politician, formerly Minister of University and Research in the Prodi II Cabinet. A former member of the Italian Communist Party and then Democrats of the Left, he became a lead founding member of the Democratic Left. Mussi was then a member of Left Ecology Freedom (SEL), which the Democratic Left merged into in 2010, before...

Carlo Rubbia OMRI OMCA is an Italian particle physicist and inventor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Simon van der Meer for work leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN.

Antonio Tabucchi was an Italian writer and academic who taught Portuguese language and literature at the University of Siena, Italy. Deeply in love with Portugal, he was an expert, critic and translator of the works of Fernando Pessoa from whom he drew the conceptions of saudade, of fiction and of the heteronyms. Tabucchi was first introduced to Pessoa's works in...

Tomaso Montanari is an Italian art historian, academic and essayist.

Maria Michela Marzano is an Italian researcher, philosopher and writer. Politically connected to the Italian left, she was elected a Member of the Italian Parliament for the Democratic Party in February 2013.

Franca Pilla, sometimes known as Franca Ciampi, is a former first lady of Italy, serving during the presidency of her husband, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. She is the oldest living former first lady of both the world and Italy.

Vito Volterra KBE FRS HFRSE was an Italian mathematician and physicist, known for his contributions to mathematical biology and integral equations, being one of the founders of functional analysis.

Antonio Maccanico was an Italian constitutional specialist and politician who served in various capacities in the Italian Parliament and federal administrations of Italy. He was the former general secretary of the Quirinal Palace from 1978 to 1987, and was several times minister and undersecretary to the Prime Minister under Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. He was also president of Mediobanca.

Maria Chiara Carrozza is an Italian physicist, engineer and politician who served as Minister of Education, University and Research in the government of Prime Minister Enrico Letta between April 2013 and February 2014. She has been president of the National Research Council of Italy from April 2021 to May 2025.

Giuliano Amato OMRI is an Italian politician who twice served as Prime Minister of Italy, first from 1992 to 1993 and again from 2000 to 2001. Upon Arnaldo Forlani's death in July 2023, Amato became the country's earliest-serving surviving Prime Minister.

Enrico Letta is an Italian politician who served as Prime Minister of Italy from April 2013 to February 2014, leading a grand coalition of centre-left and centre-right parties. He later was the leader of the Democratic Party (PD) from March 2021 to March 2023.

Pope Clement XII, born Lorenzo Corsini, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 12 July 1730 to his death in February 1740.

Pope Urban VIII, born Maffeo Vincenzo Barberini, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 6 August 1623 to his death, in July 1644. As pope, he expanded the papal territory by force of arms and advantageous politicking, and was also a prominent patron of the arts, commissioning works from artists like Gian Lorenzo Bernini,...

Enrico Fermi was an Italian and naturalized American physicist, renowned for being the creator of the world's first artificial nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, and a member of the Manhattan Project. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" and the "architect of the atomic bomb". He was one of very few physicists to excel in both theoretical...

Roberto Battiston is an Italian physicist, specialized in the field of fundamental physics and elementary particles, and leading experts in the physics of cosmic rays. He was the president of the Italian Space Agency from 2014 to 2018 and president of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) Committee on Astroparticle Physics from 2009 to 2014.

Sabino Cassese OMRI is an Italian jurist, former minister for the public function in the Ciampi government (1993–1994), and judge of the Constitutional Court of Italy (2005–2014).

Alessio Figalli is an Italian mathematician working primarily on the calculus of variations and partial differential equations.