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What that article says is that in Italy, people earning a Master's degree used to be called Doctor. Since the explanations in that article were somewhat muddled, I followed a link to this article about the Italian Master's degree (Laurea), which explains things a little better. That article says that a Laurea is something between a Bachelor and a Master's degree, and that the doctorate was added in the mid-1980s.

So, again, we have evidence that Rossi does not have a doctorate, since at the time he (allegedly) attended university, it was not even possible to earn a doctorate in Italy (according to that article). (I should point out here that Rossi isn't claiming to have a Laurea--the degree he claims to have is a Dottore Magistrale, which is a Master's.) That still leaves open the question of how someone getting a degree in philosophy has any of the theoretical or practical knowledge necessary to do physics research. I can confidently say that I have never seen a philosopher in a laboratory (although I've seen that many Doctors of Philosophy, including myself, work in labs).

Again, there's a difference between the American understanding of "philosophy" and the Classical understanding of the same term.

It's like this ~ many people imagine they have a legitimate college degree because they have studied hard sciences, or accounting.

They don't ~ unless you have an A.B., where you must almost universally pass a foreign language requirement.

In addition, following the classical divisions of education you almost immediately notice that SOME have no doctorate ~ never did ~ never will.

When I was in school you had to have 18 hours of a foreign language to earn an AB (or BA) ~ my degree is written in latin BTW. Then, to get a Masters in the College of Arts and Sciences you had to pass a reading course in a third language.

A doctorate required passing a reading course in a fourth language.

I was on that track for a while, and built on high school latin to take college Spanish and graduate level French, and went ahead and worked on Italian and Rumanian to see if I could get ahead of the program.

Rossi ~ or almost any person in Italy selected to go to university, would have graduated with knowledge of Latin, Italian, probably French or German, and certainly by 1975, English.

There's his bad accent BTW.

Back then not everybody got to go to university ~ so all those graduates of their universities were "special".

For quite a long time Continental European University level studies were more like the Upper Division in American universities (those 300 and 400 level courses) and many Master's programs.

The university track students were wrapping up Freshman and Sophomore college level materials in the equivalent of highschool.

Rossi's 3 or 4 years of university study is the rough equivalent of 5 or 6 years of American University study in an Engineering program.