| abstract | - The University of Pisa (Italian Università di Pisa), is an Italian public research university located in Pisa, Italy. It was founded in 1343 by an edict of Pope Clement VI and is the 19th oldest extant university in the world and the 10th oldest in the country. The university is considered very prestigious and is currently ranked between 1st and 3rd places nationally, in the top 30 in Europe and top 300 in the world. It houses the Orto botanico di Pisa, Europe's oldest academic botanical garden, which was founded in 1544. The University of Pisa is part of the Pisa University System, which includes the Scuola Normale Superiore and the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies. It offers a wide range of courses. The Computer Science course at University of Pisa is the first in the area to be activated in Italy. The aerospace Master of Science (MSc) courses are the first in Italy to be offered entirely in the English language.[citation needed] The university has about 57,000 students (of which 53,000 are undergraduate and postgraduate studies and 3,500 are doctoral and specialization studies). In the fields of philology and cultural studies, the University of Pisa is a leading member of ICoN, an inter-university consortium of 21 Italian universities supported by the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research. The University is also a member of the European University Association, the Partnership of a European Group of Aeronautics and Space Universities network and the Cineca consortium. It's the only university in Italy which has become a member of the prestigious Universities Research Association. Two Italian Presidents, five Popes and four Prime Ministers of Italy have been graduates as well as 3 Nobel Laureates have been student, faculty or staff affiliates. Pisa has an intense athletic rivalry with the University of Pavia which traditionally culminates in the Pisa-Pavia Regatta (Regata Pisa-Pavia), the oldest competition of this kind in Italy and second in Europe only to the Oxford Cambridge boat race. In 2011, the University of Pisa came in first place among the Italian universities, according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities.
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