Italian healthcare has a long history of great tradition: the School of Medicine in Salerno and the University of Padua are but two examples of history and excellence. Recently, it has evolved, and Italians have produced 6 Nobel prizes in medicine. Newsweek published its annual ranking of the 250 best hospitals in the world in 2025; 13 were Italian, of which 2 were in the top 50.

This all goes to say that Italy, despite being a relatively small country, can offer top-quality healthcare. This quality is granted by its education (universities), which form highly trained doctors, and research in the most advanced equipment available.

This article will offer a closer look at one specific type of treatment that requires the highest level of technology and expertise: radiotherapy. Due to its nature and use, radiotherapy is often seen as something scary: it is used for the treatment of cancer. Nevertheless, radiotherapy has evolved over the years, becoming less and less invasive with a precision that now is nearly down to the single cell. A lot of these new technologies and expertise come from Italian engineers and professionals.

Indeed, this evolution made it necessary to have new professional figures like doctors who are also prepared in nuclear physics.  There are already some examples of hospitals or groups in the country that are using these top-notch technologies, some since the ’80s. For example, the CyberKnyfe is a robotized system that performs stereotactic surgery, meaning it uses external radiation precisely delivered to a tumor. Although the inventor was an American neurosurgeon, John Ronald Adler, the first idea came from an Italian neurosurgeon, Federico Colombo, who worked at the San Bortolo hospital in Vicenza. Indeed, the CyberKnyfe installed in 2001 in Vicenza, and used by Dr. Colombo himself, was the first one in Europe.

Radiotherapeutic treatment machines might look like relatively simple and small equipment; however, there is much more than meets the eye. Radiation is produced by accelerators, exactly like the ones we heard about in physics experiments. This can happen, for example, with linear accelerators, and as the name says, they unfold on a straight line. One of the most advanced can be found at the Humanitas clinic, called EDGE. Humanitas was one of the first in Europe to obtain this technology, and the first in Italy: it refers to Varian Edge system, symbolizing the cutting-edge technology in the radiation therapy treatments. Humanitas had all the equipment needed to install it, going from the OSMS system (Optical Surface Monitoring System) to the Calypso system (which sends beacons to the machinery for precise localization, like a GPS tracking system). EDGE allows sending radiation at the highest speed and precision, making cancer treatment minimally invasive while keeping it on an outpatient regimen.

Another way to produce the radiation is with a circular accelerator, like the one see at CERN. Indeed, one of the most important contributors was Prof. Ugo Amaldi, a nuclear physician at the famous lab in Switzerland. Of course, it is smaller, but it still requires a lot of space. This happens at CNAO, in Pavia, with the first Italian adrotherapy center. This piece of equipment was built in 2001 inside a 1600 square meter bunker. It has a diameter of 25 meters and is the only one in the country capable of accelerating protons as well as carbon ions. It has three operation rooms, and it can treat tumors up to 32 cm deep without damaging the surrounding tissues with a precision of 2 tenths of a millimeter. There are now three other similar machines in Italy

These are but some examples of the excellence Italy has to offer, but it can give an idea of the high level of engineering and preparation needed to build, maintain, and operate such wonders. They have all been inserted into the National Healthcare and, some companies, are trying to make them accessible for those in need around the world.