Four Italian Hospitals Reach the World's Top Ten, and the South Is Not Among Them

Four Italian hospitals have been placed among the world's top ten for specialist care in a new global ranking, according to The Local Italy, which reported the result on Friday. The same ranking, the outlet noted, shows a stark divide between the north and the south of the country. That combination — excellence at the top of the table and a widening gap beneath it — is the finding that matters most for patients outside the regions where the best-known institutions sit.

The Local Italy did not name the hospitals in its summary, and La Veduta cannot fill that gap from Italian sources, which this newspaper does not use. What the foreign report does establish is the shape of the result: a small group of Italian institutions performing at or near the highest international level in particular specialities, set against a persistent geographic inequality in the care the rest of the country can reach.

For Campania the arithmetic is familiar and unwelcome. A region of some 5.6 million people, with Naples as its capital, sits on the southern side of a line that foreign coverage of Italy has drawn for decades when it describes health care, infrastructure and investment. The ranking does not say Campania's hospitals are failing. It says the distance between the best Italian medicine and the medicine most Italians can reach has not closed.