What to Do When a University's Website Is Only in Italian

Somewhere in the process of building your university shortlist, you'll click through to a university's own website looking for a specific detail, a department page, an academic calendar, a course regulation document, and find it's only in Italian. It happens constantly, and it trips candidates up more than it should.

Which pages are usually translated, and which aren't

The pages built specifically for international admissions, the ones covering the IMAT, tuition, and enrollment, are almost always available in English, because international candidates are exactly who they're written for. The pages that weren't built for you, departmental announcements, internal regulations, course-specific syllabi, academic senate minutes, are often Italian-only, simply because no one writing them had an international audience in mind in the first place.

How to actually get what you need from them

A browser's built-in translation gets you most of the way there for factual content like deadlines, course lists, or facility descriptions, and it's genuinely reliable for that. Where it gets shakier is anything written in formal or bureaucratic language, admissions regulations, appeal procedures, degree requirements, where a mistranslated clause can quietly give you the wrong impression of a rule that actually matters.

What to double-check instead of trusting outright

For anything that affects your actual eligibility or deadlines, cross-check it against Universitaly's official information and the university's own English-language international office page, rather than relying on a translated version of an Italian-only internal page. If the two sources disagree, treat that as a sign to ask directly, not as a sign to simply pick whichever version you like better.

When it's worth just emailing the international office

If a detail genuinely changes your decision, which specific facilities a department has, whether a dual-degree track exists, how a particular exam session is structured, and you can't find a clear English answer anywhere, email the international office directly. Most universities have one specifically because this exact problem comes up constantly. A short, specific question gets a far more useful answer than one pieced together from a machine-translated page that was never meant for you.

A language barrier on a university's own website is an annoyance, not a dead end. Know which pages to trust in English, which to translate carefully, and which to just ask about directly.