[muawiyah]

Our funny little friends at WIKI have a piece on Italian Academic Degrees and until recently you could only get ONE DEGREE TITLE in Italy ~ the Dottore.

You might want to read about that before getting too terribly excited one way or the other.

Wiki says that this often confuses foreigners.

[exDemMom]

Our funny little friends at WIKI have a piece on Italian Academic Degrees and until recently you could only get ONE DEGREE TITLE in Italy ~ the Dottore.

You might want to read about that before getting too terribly excited one way or the other.

Do you mean this Wiki article? It corroborates everything I said.

"Dottore" means "doctor", "master", or "graduate". In the context of education, the third definition is probably the pertinent one. The Ph.D. is a "Dottorati".

Although I found plenty of references to the education reform (the purpose of which was to standardize education across Europe), I have found nothing that says only one degree was offered previous to the reform.