1. Is Parthenope's Medicine and Surgery programme new?
+Yes, it was activated for the 2025/2026 academic year, making it one of the newest medical degree programmes in Italy.
The University of Naples Parthenope has a very different history from the ancient institution of Federico II across the city. It began life in 1919 as the Regio Istituto Superiore Navale, a specialised higher education institute set up on the initiative of Vice-Admiral Leonardi Cattolica to train professionals for Italy's growing merchant navy and maritime economy. Formalised by royal decree in 1920 and later renamed the Istituto Universitario Navale, it carried that maritime identity for roughly seventy years before broadening into a full multi-faculty university.
In 1999, the institution reorganised itself into the university now known as Parthenope, expanding well beyond its naval and economics roots to add faculties in Law, Engineering and Sport Sciences. That expansion has continued in the years since, and the university has steadily built a reputation across a wider range of disciplines than its founding purpose would suggest.
Medicine is the newest addition to that expansion. Parthenope's Corso di Laurea Magistrale a Ciclo Unico in Medicina e Chirurgia, a six-year single-cycle degree carrying 360 ECTS credits, was activated for the 2025/2026 academic year, backed by a substantial regional investment of around €30 million from Campania toward building out the programme's teaching and clinical infrastructure. This makes it one of the youngest medical degree programmes in Italy, with none of the decades or centuries of institutional history that some other schools on this list can point to.
Because the programme is so new, it does not have its own dedicated university hospital in the way that older Italian medical schools typically do. Instead, clinical training is being built around partnerships with a cluster of hospitals across Naples, including Ospedale Monaldi, the CTO orthopaedic and trauma centre, Ospedale Cotugno, and Ospedale del Mare, giving students exposure across several specialised sites rather than one single teaching hospital campus.
The course is taught in Italian, in line with Italy's national reform of medical admissions that came into effect from the 2025/2026 academic year. Under this system, known as the Semestre Filtro or Semestre Aperto, applicants register freely for an open first semester of lectures and then sit standardised national exams in Biology, Chemistry and Physics; a national merit ranking based on those results decides who is confirmed into a place, replacing the older single entrance-exam model used in previous years for Italian-medium medicine courses.
Because Parthenope's medicine programme has only just launched, prospective applicants should treat published details on seat numbers, fee bands and even some administrative processes as provisional and subject to change from one intake to the next, at least until the programme completes its first full graduating cycle and settles into a more established routine. Checking the university's own official pages each admissions cycle is particularly important here, more so than for a long-established faculty.
Fees are expected to follow the same broad, income-banded structure used by other Italian public universities, typically starting from a few hundred euros at the lowest income bands and rising toward roughly €3,000 to €4,000 per year at the top bands, alongside a small fixed regional tax, though the university's specific fee schedule for the medicine programme should be confirmed directly given how recently the course was approved.
Naples itself is one of Italy's most historic and culturally rich cities, sitting on the Bay of Naples with Mount Vesuvius visible across the water, and is considerably cheaper to live in than Milan or Rome. Monthly living costs, including rent, food and transport, typically run somewhere between €600 and €900, with shared-room accommodation available from around €200 to €450 per month depending on location.
Indian students considering Parthenope need to weigh both the Italian-language requirement and the newness of the programme against its advantages. NEET remains necessary for eventual registration with India's National Medical Commission, and graduates hoping to return to India must clear NExT, the exam that has replaced the older FMGE screening test, regardless of how established or new their Italian medical school is.
Because the entire course, from the filter-semester exams through to hospital ward rounds, is conducted in Italian, this programme realistically requires a genuinely functional command of the Italian language from the outset, generally expected to be at least B2 level, since Parthenope currently offers no English-medium alternative for Medicine and Surgery.
In summary, Parthenope offers a brand-new medicine programme inside a university with a distinctive maritime and multi-disciplinary history, backed by significant regional investment and a growing cluster of hospital partnerships across Naples. The trade-offs are the lack of institutional track record specific to medicine, an entirely Italian-language admissions and teaching process, and the general uncertainty that comes with being one of the newest medical faculties in the country.
