Italy has taken a step ahead in aiding nuclear fusion research with a new supercomputing system capable of performing around 27 trillion operations per second. The PITAGORA supercomputer was inaugurated at the CINECA interuniversity consortium in Casalecchio di Reno (part of the metropolitan city of Bologna), funded by the European EUROfusion Consortium, and managed in collaboration with ENEA, the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy, and Sustainable Economic Development. PITAGORA is the result of a public tender held by the EUROfusion consortium in September 2022, which Italy, ENEA, and CINECA won. The purpose of the tender was to establish a supercomputing infrastructure to support the scientific community within the EUROfusion consortium, which is engaged in nuclear fusion research for the industrial generation of electricity. In this instance, the supercomputer will be dedicated to the numerical simulation of plasma physics (regarded as the fourth state of matter, separate from solid, liquid, and gas) and to the structural analysis of advanced materials, specifically high-performance materials utilized in high-tech applications. The high-performance computing provided by PITAGORA is also critical for validating the experimental results obtained by ITER, an international project aimed at building an experimental nuclear fusion reactor, and enabling the design of the future DEMO fusion power plant. The latter, abbreviated as DEMOnstration Power Plant, is a prototype nuclear fusion reactor created by EUROfusion as the ideal successor to the experimental ITER reactor. PITAGORA also provides environmental reassurance because the procedure is designed to minimize heat generation. High energy efficiency was, in fact, a major component in the system's design: the supercomputer employs direct liquid cooling technology, which dissipates up to 97% of the heat generated and ensures excellent operational efficiency.