300 foreign students on Federico II’s new campus in Naples

 

The Campus of the University of Naples Federico II in San Giovanni a Teduccio, on the outskirts of Naples, is one of the best projects in Europe carried out with EU funds.

The Campus has a free entrance and offers a green park equipped for students and citizens. Something totally different from the degraded reality of the eastern suburb of Naples and gives positive effects on the territory itself.

The rector of Federico II University, Prof. Gaetano Manfredi, stated: “We are proud, this is the recognition to a collective work that has been able to count on an intense collaboration between institutions and between individuals. This allowed us to experiment with a new teaching and to attract businesses.”

These companies have settled within the Campus in collaboration with the university: the Campus is an visible reality that hosts about a thousand engineering students a day, one-third of which are international.

The first company to settle in the new campus was the Apple Academy , upon a collaboration with the university aiming at graduating 400 young app developers on a yearly basis.

Subsequently, companies such as Cisco, Tim, Intesa San Paolo, Deloitte, the metrological service centre Cesma and the business incubator Campania New Steel established offices in San Giovanni a Teduccio.

A second part of the project provides for the doubling of the original core. New classrooms, laboratories and locations of the CNR (the Italian National Research Agency), green areas as well as parking slots. A brand news Palace of Innovation will be completed by 2024.

The total investment so far has been 96 million euros, divided into 4 tranches. The first, in the period 2000-2006 with a dowry of 10 million. To this is added, in the period 2007-2013, a budget of 20 million. In the programming for the 2014-2020 period there are another 40 million to which are added about 26 million Poc (Supplementary Operational Plan).

In addition to these investments, ESF (European Social Fund) resources converge around 12 million used for scholarships to students of the Apple Academy and funding to the transport sector, in order to facilitate connections with other areas of the city of Naples and with the station and airport.

The pool of teachers that monitors the positive effects of the presence of the University on the district of San Giovanni in Teduccio is formed by an urbanist, a historian, economists and sociologists. About this, Mita Marra, professor of the pool, said: “The university is attended by a thousand young people, a third of whom are foreigners“.

 

Read more (in Italian) in La Voce di New York.