Description
The Scuola Normale Superiore, known to all as "the Normale", is a public university school based in Pisa, in the Palazzo della Carovana, in Piazza dei Cavalieri. More than a monument it is an institution: from the square you see the facade, inside study the students, admitted by competitive exam and given free room and board.
The Normale has two classes, Humanities and Sciences, and a department of Political and Social Sciences. It has seven sites in Pisa, one in Cortona and one in Florence.
Two Nobel laureates in physics have come through the Normale, Enrico Fermi and Carlo Rubbia, the mathematician Alessio Figalli, a Fields medalist, and two presidents of the Republic, Giovanni Gronchi and Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. In all, about six thousand students.
Above all, see the facade of the Palazzo della Carovana, decorated in sgraffito to a design by Vasari. On the square also stands the Palazzo dell'Orologio, where part of the School's library is housed, which has passed a million volumes. The palace is also the set for a few episodes of the series "My Brilliant Friend".
The Normale, curiously, was invented by Napoleon. In 1810 Tuscany was a province of his empire, and a decree created in Pisa a branch of the École normale supérieure of Paris. "Normale" because it was to train teachers who would teach according to common "norms".
The first students arrived in 1813, in a former convent, under rules halfway between barracks and monastery that even set how they were to dress.
It lasted a year: Napoleon abdicated and the school closed. In 1846 Grand Duke Leopold II refounded it, and the following year the Palazzo della Carovana took it in. In 1862 it became the Scuola Normale of the Kingdom of Italy. The first building the School received as a gift, in 1932, is the Collegio Timpano.
The 20th century brought light and shadow. Giovanni Gentile, an ideologue of Fascism, made it free of charge and autonomous; in 1938 the racial laws arrived. During the war the palace was a German barracks, and the mathematician Leonida Tonelli defended its library. After the Liberation, seventy places were opened by competition for students who were veterans or partisans.
Don't miss
• The facade of the Palazzo della Carovana.
• The Palazzo dell'Orologio.
• Piazza dei Cavalieri.
Did you know?
• In the admission exam originality and intuition count for more than memorized facts.
• The women's section was born only in 1959, seventy years after the admission of the first female student.
• The Salviati archive, among the School's manuscripts, also holds an autograph of Machiavelli.
The Normale has two classes, Humanities and Sciences, and a department of Political and Social Sciences. It has seven sites in Pisa, one in Cortona and one in Florence.
Two Nobel laureates in physics have come through the Normale, Enrico Fermi and Carlo Rubbia, the mathematician Alessio Figalli, a Fields medalist, and two presidents of the Republic, Giovanni Gronchi and Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. In all, about six thousand students.
Above all, see the facade of the Palazzo della Carovana, decorated in sgraffito to a design by Vasari. On the square also stands the Palazzo dell'Orologio, where part of the School's library is housed, which has passed a million volumes. The palace is also the set for a few episodes of the series "My Brilliant Friend".
The Normale, curiously, was invented by Napoleon. In 1810 Tuscany was a province of his empire, and a decree created in Pisa a branch of the École normale supérieure of Paris. "Normale" because it was to train teachers who would teach according to common "norms".
The first students arrived in 1813, in a former convent, under rules halfway between barracks and monastery that even set how they were to dress.
It lasted a year: Napoleon abdicated and the school closed. In 1846 Grand Duke Leopold II refounded it, and the following year the Palazzo della Carovana took it in. In 1862 it became the Scuola Normale of the Kingdom of Italy. The first building the School received as a gift, in 1932, is the Collegio Timpano.
The 20th century brought light and shadow. Giovanni Gentile, an ideologue of Fascism, made it free of charge and autonomous; in 1938 the racial laws arrived. During the war the palace was a German barracks, and the mathematician Leonida Tonelli defended its library. After the Liberation, seventy places were opened by competition for students who were veterans or partisans.
Don't miss
• The facade of the Palazzo della Carovana.
• The Palazzo dell'Orologio.
• Piazza dei Cavalieri.
Did you know?
• In the admission exam originality and intuition count for more than memorized facts.
• The women's section was born only in 1959, seventy years after the admission of the first female student.
• The Salviati archive, among the School's manuscripts, also holds an autograph of Machiavelli.