Italy officially joins the great race to procure around the world the nurses who have become the most valuable "commodity" in hospitals and not only in Italian wards. There is a minimum shortage of 65,000 and they are hard to find, but as early as next year 10,000 could arrive from India thanks to an agreement that Health Minister Orazio Schillaci has made with the Indian government, while a few thousand more will arrive based on regional initiatives, such as that of Lombardy, which is expecting the first 200 Argentine nurses soon, or projects such as "Samaritanus Care" of the 1370 religious health facilities of Aris and Uneba that will bring in more than a thousand a year trained by Catholic universities in developing countries such as Nigeria, Tanzania, Cameroon, Argentina, Peru and India. Foreign nurses in Italy are certainly not new: already today there are over 38,000 with Romanians (12,000) and Poles (2,000) among the most present followed by Indians and Albanians (over 1,800 each) and Peruvians (1,500), but with the new arrivals they are about to become at least 50,000 by 2025, in practice more than one nurse in 10 (there are 460,000 registered nurses) will come from outside and will have to learn Italian.