Ca' Foscari University of Venice

The institution was founded as the Regia Scuola Superiore di Commercio ("royal high school of commerce") by a Royal Decree dated 6 August 1868, and teaching commenced in December of the same year. The idea of establishing such a school had arisen after the annexation of the Veneto to the new Kingdom of Italy in 1866, and was promoted by three people in particular: the Jewish political economist Luigi Luzzatti, later Prime Minister of Italy; Edoardo Deodati, senator of the Kingdom of Italy and vice-president of the province of Venice; and the Sicilian political economist Francesco Ferrara, director of the school for its first thirty years.[2]

The school was the first institute of higher education in commerce in Italy,[8] and was from the outset conceived as a national rather than a regional institution; it had a diplomatic arm to prepare commercial consular staff for overseas service, and was also a training college for secondary school teachers of commercial subjects. Foreign languages were taught from the start. The school was modelled on the Institut Supérieur de Commerce d'Anvers, founded in 1853 in Antwerp, Belgium.[2]

Following the establishment of a national syllabus for university teaching in 1935, the Istituto Superiore di Economia e Commercio di Venezia, as it was by then called, was authorised to teach and award four-year laurea degrees.[9] In 1968 it obtained university status, and the name was changed to Università degli Studi di Venezia. In the following year two new faculties were created, of industrial chemistry and of philosophy and letters.[2]

The university is divided into eight departments:[10]

• Economics
• Philosophy and cultural heritage
• Management
• Environmental science, computer science and statistics
• Molecular science and nanosystems
• Linguistic and comparative cultural studies
• Humanities
• Asian and Mediterranean African studies

Ca' Foscari is ranked among the best universities in Italy, ranking 5th in 2017 out of 89 universities.[11][12]

In 2017 Ca' Foscari's economics department was ranked as Italy's 3rd best, surpassed by University of Bologna and University of Padua.[13]

The QS World University Ranking by subject has placed Ca’ Foscari of Venice among the top 100 universities in the world for modern languages, among the top 150 in the world for humanities, and among the top 200 in the world for economics and management.[14]

The University also ranked as the third best public university in Italy for their quality of research according to ANVUR (the National Agency for the Evaluation of University Research Systems) in 2018.[15]

In 2018 six recipients of the Nobel Prize gave lectures at the university: Robert F. Engle, Martin Karplus, Mario Vargas Llosa, Robert C. Merton, Amartya Sen, Wole Soyinka and Muhammad Yunus.[16]

Among the alumni of the university are:

• Giuseppe De'Longhi, businessman[17]
• Enrico Dallavecchia, businessman[18]
• 

  San Servolo Campus
  Roberto Meneguzzo, banker and investor[19]
• Renzo Rosso, businessman, founder of the clothing brand Diesel[20]
• Michele Boldrin, economist[21]
• Paolo Costa, economist and politician[22]
• Carlo Carraro, economist and Ca' Foscari's sitting president[23]
• Ugo La Malfa, politician[24]
• Flaminio Piccoli, politician[25]
• Lilli Gruber, politician, author, journalist and TV-personality[26]
• Barbara Frale, historian[27]
• Paul Watzlawick, philosopher and psychologist[28]
• Damiano Michieletto, opera director[29]
• Massimiliano Frani, pianist[30]

• List of universities in Italy