Italy's six top higher education institutes, catering for an elite of graduate and postgraduate students, have formed a permanent national network of cooperation and joint ventures in teaching and research.
This will include inter-school courses, exchanges of students and lecturers, and the hiring of academics and experts, mainly from abroad, to teach only in the new "elite circuit".
The six schools, all part of Italy's state university system and each linked to a state university, are the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna and the Scuola Normale Superiore, both in Pisa, the SISSA in Trieste, Catania's Scuola Superiore, the ISUFI in Lecce, and the IUSS in Pavia.
The pact, signed at the university ministry in Rome at the end of January, aims also to develop and intensify collaboration with similar institutions in other countries.