How to read a bando, the document that actually decides
A bando is the call document a region or a university publishes, and it is the only thing that decides who is eligible. Every summary of Italian funding, ours included, is a summary of a bando somebody else read.
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In this article
What a bando is
A bando is a public call. A regional agency or a university publishes one for each cycle, and it sets out who may apply, what they must supply, and by when.
It is not marketing and it is not a guide. It is the governing document, and where it disagrees with any summary anywhere, including this site, the bando is right.
It is usually a PDF, usually in Italian, and usually longer than it needs to be. That is why almost nobody in this category reads one.
Where the criteria sit
The eligibility rules are rarely on the first page. Look for the article headed requisiti, meaning requirements, and read it before anything else.
For a right-to-study grant it will name the income measure and its ceiling. For 2025/26 those ceilings were an ISEE of €27,947.79 and an ISPE of €60,756.06. It will also say whether first-year applicants are assessed on economics alone, which for DSU they are.
It will separate students by residence category. Fuori sede, meaning you moved away from home to study, is the category that carries the largest package and the strictest evidence.
The document list is in an annex
The list of what you must supply is almost never in the body of the call. It sits in an allegato, an annex, at the end.
That annex is the part a non-Italian applicant needs most, because it is where the legalisation and translation requirements appear for documents issued abroad.
Open the annex first if you are short of time. It tells you within a page whether you can realistically apply this cycle.
The date on the front is often not the date that ends your application
A call carries several dates: when the platform opens, when the application closes, when supporting documents must arrive, and when the ranking is published.
The closing date on the cover is the one everyone quotes. The one that ends most applications is the document deadline, because a submitted application with a missing legalised document is not a complete application.
For 2026/27 several regional calls ran from mid July to 30 September 2026. The University of Milan and ER.GO both used 10 July to 30 September 2026. Universitaly pre-enrolment for the same cycle closed on 30 September 2026 as well, which is a separate deadline for a separate process.
What changes between cycles, and what does not
The structure is stable. The ceilings, the amounts and the dates are not, and they are the parts every summary gets wrong first.
So a summary written last year can be right about how the scheme works and wrong about every number in it. That is why our records carry the date the source was last opened, and why the figures above are marked with theirs.
A student who can read a bando does not need our summary. They can also check it, which is the better outcome of the two.
Asked and answered
3 questions this article gets.
What is a bando?
It is the official call document published by a region or a university for one funding cycle. It sets the eligibility rules, the document list and the deadlines, and it overrides any summary of itself.
Do I have to read Italian to apply?
The call is usually published in Italian, and some agencies publish an English version that is explicitly not authoritative. Read the Italian for the dates and the ceilings, which are numbers and survive translation.
Which deadline in a bando matters most?
Usually the document deadline rather than the closing date on the cover, because an application missing a legalised document is not complete.
Check it yourself
What this article was read out of.
Open any of them. If a document does not say what we said it says, the article is wrong. We would rather hear that from you than not hear it.
Each date is the day a person opened the link, not the day this file was edited.
The documents
The records underneath
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