Study in Italy, from Pakistan.

The money must sit in your own account, or be evidenced by a scholarship or a sponsor affidavit. Cash is explicitly rejected, and so are guarantees from third parties outside your family.

The rest of the file is paper. The validated Universitaly application, the admission letter, CIMEA or a Declaration of Value, academic documents apostilled and translated, a B2 certificate in Italian or English, proof of accommodation, a flight reservation, your CNIC and a NADRA family registration certificate, bank statements, tax returns and your sponsor's documents.

The embassy publishes no appointment waiting time and no processing duration. The week counts and day counts quoted elsewhere in this category come from consultancies, not from the embassy, so we do not publish one either. Plan against the deadlines that are published instead.

The DSU package also carries a regional tax refund of about €140 to €160, two free meals a day, and a studentato room where one is available. First-year eligibility is economic and not academic: your family's ISEE must be €27,947.79 or below and the ISPE €60,756.06 or below. Later years add credit thresholds.

It is regional, not national. ER.GO in Emilia-Romagna, DSU Toscana, EDISU Piemonte and DiSCo Lazio each publish their own call, so the agency you apply to depends on where your university is.

For a Pakistani family the difficulty is the paperwork, not the grant. Income, property and bank documents legalised through MOFA and the Italian Embassy, certified Italian translations, a NADRA family registration certificate, a codice fiscale, and usually an ISEE Parificato.

The government's own MAECI scholarship pays €900 to €1,000 a month for nine months, with a tuition waiver and insurance. The 2026/27 call closed on 26 March 2026. Whether Pakistan sits on the current eligible-country list is something we could not confirm against the call itself, and we would rather write that sentence than guess for you.

Invest Your Talent in Italy pays €1,000 a month for nine months, so €9,000, for English-taught Master's degrees in engineering, design, economics and management. The ninth call ran from 23 January 2024 to 24 February 2025. The next window has not been announced.

University merit awards are the gap. Italy keeps no central register of them, and most of what is marketed as a university merit scholarship turns out to be a regional DSU call under a different name. We check the institution's own fees and grants page before any award goes on this site.

The band below lists each date with the state it is in today. That state is worked out when the page loads, not typed in by us, because a site whose whole claim is that it checked cannot show an expired date as open.

The MAECI call for 2026/27 closed on 26 March 2026 at 14:00 Italian time. Its nine-month grants run from 1 November 2026 to 31 July 2027. The next call is expected around March 2027 and we will publish the date on the day the ministry does.

Visa issuance for the 2026/27 intake is reported to stop around late November 2026. That is a reported window rather than a published cut-off, so treat it as the outer edge and not as a plan.

Italy runs on a cycle, and the cycle is unforgiving in one direction only. Miss the pre-enrolment window and you are applying next year with a stronger file, which is a worse answer than a place but a much better one than a refused application.